Yahoo Site Explorer Retired

November 21st, Yahoo took the final step in the Site Explorer closure and shut the doors. Marketers are now referred to Bing's Webmaster Tools to get some of the valuable data that Site Explorer used to provide us.

No longer will we be able to use Yahoo's vast data set to analyze competitor's sites, see who is linking to them and apply those strategies to our own sites.

Bing's Webmaster Tools only provides data on sites verified as your own, not on just any Web site. We can say it was great while it lasted, and we'll all reluctantly switch over to less comprehensive data sets as we have no other options at this time as no other major search engine is currently releasing data on any Web site.

We can only hope that Bing may decide to add this information to their reporting for webmasters, although we don't believe it's likely. However if they did, it would certainly provide a big boost to usage of Bing's Webmaster Tools.

There are a few alternatives available, however pricing is a bit prohibitive as compared to the free data Yahoo provided. Majestic SEO offers Free Data for sites you own, limited data on other sites, and offers in depth competitive data starting at 46.62 USD (UK £29.99 per month) and ramping up in cost quickly on higher volume reports.

Open Site Explorer also offers similar, limited link data for free, but it's also expensive to get the anything near the data we used to get from Yahoo. Their reports sell for $99 per month for Pro Accounts and is limited to 10,000 links per report.

We're using Majestic SEO's data for Planet Ocean's Site Strength Indicator Tool which you may find handy, just click the inbound link number to see a summary of the sites link data.