From Yahoo official blog press release, one of their great tool "Yahoo Site Explorer" already completely closed. From November 21, 2011, this product got it's life cycle and related API will be shutdown too. The Yahoo site explorer is merged into "Bing Webmaster Tools" which is co-operation result between Microsoft and Yahoo.
What kind of effect will this affair bring to us?
To learn about the effect, we need to know what actually good of yahoo site explorer is. Absolutely, every webmaster should be familar with this tool because it's always accurate for website backlinks checking. Comparing to other similar tools, yahoo site explorer is quick and easy to use. The best of the best is this service is completely free! As it's merged into Bing webmaster tools, webmasters won't be able to check site links so conveniently.
Related sources:
Yahoo site explorer
Bing Webmaster Tools
How about the Bing Webmaster Tools?
The Bing Webmaster Tools is some kind powerful and almost every functions designed there, however the site backlink checking tool is not so great than yahoo site explorer. The biggest difference is the bing product be able to check back links for your own website only, that means you have to be the website master in order to check such info, however you can do it freely from yahoo site explorer for any website. While this great tool closed and no better solution developed, webmasters (especially SEO workers) will lose the chance to learn about competition websites' backlinks and hard to check their optimization progress.
Yahoo site explorer screenshots:
yahoo site explorer closed
How do we think about yahoo?
To be honest, I personally do not have much confidence to yahoo by reviewing it's history. More and more excellent products being deleted or dropped like Delicious, MyBlogblog, Flickr etc. Now it's the turn for site explorer. I can't imagine how yahoo look likes in few years later. If they continue to manage their services, who will trust them?
Yahoo Site Explorer, a great tool that had brought great help to thousands webmasters, thanks to it's great service in the past years. At the mean time, we hope there will be such great products from the Microsoft Bing Webmater Tools.
