Sunnyvale, California — Formulated with highest precision, Yahoo Site Explorer now becomes a history as SEOs and online marketers alike are now exploring new avenues for free access to the invaluable information it provided over the past 6 years. Yahoo on Friday revealed that it would finally shut down its Site Explorer in favor of Bing Webmaster Tools as part of the final integration steps.
On its company blog, Yahoo disclosed that the move would be concluded on Monday, and that users would be redirected to Bing. Marketers trying to evaluate Yahoo traffic volumes must now find all the functionalities in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Yahoo announced the official date on her blog saying:
“With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.”
The initial transitional move between the two firms came last September and has evolved gradually since then. Any search query on Yahoo.com is now responded by Microsoft’s search engine.
However, one of the main objective people flocked to Site Explorer is the link-data: who links to what site. That specific components will not return at Bing.
Nevertheless, as Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) is incorporated in to Bing Webmaster Tools the information will be initially limited to sites you own — so competitor analysis will be lost this way. Though if Bing wishes to entice more people using their tools instead of Google, the move would be to include competitor data access like YSE showed.
Unfortunately, there are not many free tool that covers everything you could get from YSE. Besides, the companies that trade this information as part of their marketing tool platforms must be rejoicing because there really is no longer a free alternative. Still, there are some that can give people low on funds a start.
Interestingly, SEOMoz has Open Site Explorer that provides the same information, but unless you have a Pro membership the amount of the information is still limited. For people with only five websites or less, monthly fees start at $99. But you get a lot more than link information for that fee.
Going forward, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has urged internet users to give Bing a try, saying that the results are basically the same 70 percent of the time, according to Brafton reports. However, the message from Microsoft was not sufficient for people to move to Bing en masse. In terms of enterprise SEO campaigns, Google still accounts for most of the focus. Still, marketers must remember that developing a quality website will likely benefit businesses in terms of search visibility from both engines.
With the entire integration of Yahoo and Bing now concluded, Bing will continue its efforts to entice more traffic away from Google. Recently, Bing has made some decent additions that differentiate itself from Google, including implementing airport maps to help travelers navigate some of the nation’s most popular travel hubs.
Sadly so, now for culling link data we now have to depend on third party tools like Majestic SEO. Not a bad thing, but information straight from a search engine is valuable too.