[OFFICIAL] Yahoo Site Explorer Shut Down - Alternatives?

by RevSEO

Posted: 12 years ago 39 replies

Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down Monday, November 21st

Well the dreaded day that we've heard so much about is finally here, Yahoo Site Explorer shuts down its doors yesterday. This means many of the tools out there today for checking backlinks are broken, and the general ease of use of web browser plug-ins like SearchStatus and SEO Quake are don't work.

Some Alternative Link Checkers

MajesticSEO -

Currently the best alternative, MajesticSEO is a paid link checking alternative that uses their own servers to crawl and index the web. As of now there are several paid options. MajesticSEO is commonly referred to as the best paid link checker.

OpenSiteExplorer -

This is SEOMoz's backlink checker. While it's well designed and user friendly, unlike MajesticSEO, it simply doesn't have the link history or freshness that Yahoo Site Explorer and/or MajesticSEO provides. It's also a paid alternative.

Blekko - Free alternative

Blekko is a boostrapped search engine startup that prides itself on transparency of data and information, including SEO variables.
Head over to Blekko.com, and search for the following as a test. http://www.warriorforum.com /seo
This will show you the SEO information for WarriorForum, you can also dive deeper and look at links by searching
http://www.warriorforum.com/ /inbound
This will give you an idea of where links are coming from, crawl date, IP address of links and other information like NameServer info of incoming links. A valuable tool BUT limited in backlink information.

Did I miss some? Help me fill out the best backlink alternatives by providing who YOU use now that Yahoo Site Explorer has been shut down.

#alternatives #explorer #official #shut #site #yahoo

Melissa82

12 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Do you know if SEO Spyglass will still work?

Thanks
1 reply

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RevSEO

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Melissa82

Thanks for sharing. Do you know if SEO Spyglass will still work?

Well, it relies heavily on YSE but does have other avenues of checking links. Here is what SEO Spyglass recently said when asked about YSE shutting down.

1) SEO SpyGlass will continue gathering up to 100,000 links like before. Unlike other backlink tools that relied on Yahoo! Site Explorer in the first place (and may become obsolete in a couple of hours) SEO SpyGlass will continue gathering hundreds of thousands links without Yahoo! Site Explorer. SEO SpyGlass uses multiple sources to spy out links. If Site-Explorer breaks, your links will be pulled from another place. 2) Your software was massively prepared for this YSE thing over the last month. Of course we knew about the upcoming change beforehand and made a few important updates to SEO SpyGlass (adding more new backlink sources and upgrading the old ones). 3) Link count will even grow in a few weeks! Right now we're already running in-house tests of an own multi-billion database of links. This means that you will have a new, very backlink-rich channel for pulling links. You'll be able to use it in SEO SpyGlass in just a couple of weeks. So, as you see, there's no need to worry - with SEO SpyGlass you won't be caught off guard. If you're still relying on any other free backlink research tool, this might be high time you switched to SEO SpyGlass as it's already the best desktop backlink finder and is about to beat even online services for backlink search.

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MikeFriedman

12 years ago

SpyGlass has been working fine for me. It used about 10 different sources for pulling backlinks, so there has always been a lot of overlap there.

I ran a couple checks on sites today to compare to results I had previously. One site had 1852 links 2 weeks ago, 1843 links today. Another site had 1123 two weeks ago, 1220 today.

Thanks
2 replies

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Mike Anthony

12 years ago

Yep by utilizing a variety of link sources Spyglass just became even more indispensable

Thanks
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tdzido

12 years ago

What link sources do you use in Spyglass?

I've just pulled the list of their engines and EXCLUDING local country search engines. The ones left are Alexa, Blekko, Dogpile, Exalead, Excite, IceRocket, Google, of which ONLY Blekko and IceRocket are available in the free version.

I'm getting 7 backlinks total from them, earlier I was always maxing out at 1000.

This software has become unusable for me now.

What sources do you use in Spyglass? Which ones are working good for you?

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Yep by utilizing a variety of link sources Spyglass just became even more indispensable

Thanks
1 reply

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tdzido

12 years ago

Here is what I got from SEO Spyglass support:

thanks for contacting us.

Well, Yahoo! Site Explorer was closed down the other day.

BUT that's not the only backlink source that is available in . SEO SpyGlass can retrieve backlinks from a variety of search engines (Blekko.com, a new and very promising SE, is among them).

AND! In a couple of weeks or so we will have a new, very backlink-rich channel for pulling links in SEO SpyGlass! At the moment we are still running in-house tests of it. But as soon as all the tests are over, we will let you know.

Sorry for this temporary inconvenience.

Thanks

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RevSEO

12 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

That's great. But you know what the problem is with Spyglass? The time it takes to run queries.

Sure, you can fine tune it, but you can't check backlinks and other variables on the fly like you used to.

Obviously the death of YSE means added time to just about every serious SEO's daily routine.

To me, its the time savings that YSE provided that made it such a valuable tool.

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strawberryfields

12 years ago

Originally Posted by RevSEO

Obviously the death of YSE means added time to just about every serious SEO's daily routine.

To me, its the time savings that YSE provided that made it such a valuable tool.

I completely agree, that is what has frustrated me the most about this, the change in routine and the added time it is now going to take to get the data.

Personally I feel this is going to be even worse when it comes to creating new sites, as before I could just use SEOQuake to show me the Site Explorer banklink data for the sites ranking in any Google search. Now that is going to take so much more time and effort, unless of course there is a toolbar out there that does something similar.

Thanks
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Vikby 12 years ago

agree with Mike and Mike - on my end, no changes have been detected in the amount of links seo spyglass collects so provider must have figured some sort of replacement to fill in the void
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Mike Anthony 12 years ago

Originally Posted by RevSEO

Sure, you can fine tune it, but you can't check backlinks and other variables on the fly like you used to.

Yes thats the biggest bummer for me. Seoquake was great for getting a quick snapshot of competition on the front page of a serp. If they don't come up with some viable alternative then i may just uninstall it which was unthinkable for me before.
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RightGood10 12 years ago

[DELETED]

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- guynextdoor 12 years ago
  
  Yahoo missed again the chance to develop a new income source.
  
  As far as i figured out yet - there is NON fast enough backlink checker database for free.
  
  I builded many tausend's backlinks for one of my pages last month, and ranking high allready coming from nowhere - NOT one of the free tools is indexing just some links from the last 4 weeks. No way to know anymore what the concurence is doing right now.
  
  Majestic SEO seems to be the answer.. i hope tools like SEO Spyglass will update to include them (payd). But also Majestic SEO is way slower with indexing NEW backlinks then yahoo or google.
  
  Any other idea around?
  
  Thanks
  
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penpoint 12 years ago

So if Site Explorer is now a part of Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), why not just sign up for BWT and continue using it?
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- Fraggler 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by penpoint
  
  So if Site Explorer is now a part of Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), why not just sign up for BWT and continue using it?
  
  Because it will only let you check your own verified sites.
  
  Thanks
  
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Fraggler 12 years ago

Open Site Explorer's free account gives you complete access to all the backlinks it has recorded for your site. You just need to download the CSV file to access them. Create yourself some Excel macros to quickyl display the data (pivot tables etc) and bob's your uncle!

Majestic SEO's backlinks history feature is very handy though.
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dadamson 12 years ago

Most link-checking softwares will be updating their sources and providing more avenues for finding links so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Keep a record of your created links in a spreadsheet. This is the most reliable way as all link checking softwares won't find 100% of your backlinks anyway.
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highstake 12 years ago

Yahoo Site Explorer was the best tool as it was free too. I think it is a great shock to SEO industry. I am just waiting for the time when Google will show the backlinks of a site (which it shows in webmasters tool)through link command. :-)
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EvanHinrichsen 12 years ago

I'm spewing i didn't know about it!
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cagliostro 12 years ago

Guys, Spyglass is working for you ? For me the last 2-3 days it shows zero backlinks to whatever i check.
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- 1 reply
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- SEOtraveler 12 years ago
  
  working fine for me right this moment
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  cagliostro 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by SEOtraveler
  
  working fine for me right this moment
  
  Do you have any of the 2 APIs in the settings Enabled ?
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  SEOtraveler 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by cagliostro
  
  Do you have any of the 2 APIs in the settings Enabled ?
  
  no I dont enable api otpion on ssg ever as it severely limits seo spyglass "oomph" especially in the case of google and yahoo is kind of pointless anyway as yse is gone so selecting yahoo api essentially does nothing imo
  
  Thanks
  
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Rukshan 12 years ago

MajesticSEO is the best backlink checker at this moment. Anyway we missed a big tool for SEO
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artion 12 years ago

SEO Spyglass works perfect for me, paid version is mutch better
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JSProjects 12 years ago

Looks like I'll have to give Spyglass another try. I relied pretty heavily on the backlink checker inside of SB. Though I've heard that they're looking for an alternative.
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usearchme2 12 years ago

nice post glad someones put how to use blekko i bet their hits spike like you wouldnt know haha

Ste
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jacksite 12 years ago

Bad to know yahoo site explorer closed down. But still some good tools out there
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Clyde 12 years ago

You guys forgot Ahrefs.com
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- discustipated 12 years ago
  
  I found domain-pop.com this morning.
  
  Thanks
  
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Boheema 12 years ago

Thanks for all the info fellas. Tried to check out domain-pop.com, but it looks like they need to reconfigure or change servers due to all the traffic they must be getting since Site Explorer shut down. Still pissed that Yahoo would shut down such a cool feature without a clear replacement. I guess that's one reason Yahoo is in the position they're in business wise...just poor decision making.
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usearchme2 12 years ago

I checked out Ahrefs.com

does seem pretty good from a quick look around

Woc
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jeff09 12 years ago

Majestic SEO is good one
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usearchme2 12 years ago

yup agreed jeff

Seems there are loads out there and we all relyed on site explorer seems tehy might be moer better options out there.

Ste
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Marc_L 12 years ago

I get so much fewer results with seo spyglass (paid PRO) than for instance ahref.com. I have all the American sources ticked.

A domain I am researching has 447 results in spyglass and 23k in ahref. Those can't all be dupes. Also Smoz open explorer comes up with 4500 links.
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- Mike Anthony 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Marc_L
  
  I get so much fewer results with seo spyglass (paid PRO) than for instance ahref.com. I have all the American sources ticked.
  
  Yes. My earlier enthusiasm that they would have enough sources is no t panning out. Someone indicated that they were coming out with more but I have to wonder how effective that will be when most of the companies that have large databases from their own crawlers have their API on lockdown.
  
  Without solid options that have an API for spyglass to pull from I might have to go to pulling data from multiple sources. Real pain.
  
  Thanks
  
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Fraggler

12 years ago

Marc, can you extract the list from ahref and see how many actually have a link on them? That number might give a better indication of which service is the most up to date. When I was researching one to join MajesticSEO was regarded to have the most complete and up to date database but it's a bit confusing to use.

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Marc_L

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Fraggler

I don't have a premium account with ahref yet. I can only extract 500, I've been trying to export the data from smoz but its taking a while.

update:

Of the 500 links I extracted from ahref 414 were unique domains, of which, 331 had the backlink intact. Of the 500 extracted links only 53 are from unique domains.

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gtk29 12 years ago

Why did Yahoo! do it? It could become a major source of revenue for them.
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ScottM2 12 years ago

Any use seobook toolbar, I just to love it because it would show yahoo links from every site u went to. Is there anything like that now?
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- RevSEO 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by ScottM2
  
  Any use seobook toolbar, I just to love it because it would show yahoo links from every site u went to. Is there anything like that now?
  
  Nope, unfortunately not. Most of the solutions are web-based, or software based applications. Meaning that you need to be logged in to their website (MajesticSEO/OpenSiteExplorer) or run a desktop solution such as SEO Spyglass.
  
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[OFFICIAL] Yahoo Site Explorer Shut Down - Alternatives?

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