The Core

Why We Are Here => Traffic => Topic started by: 4Eyes on November 20, 2011, 03:42:40 PM

Title: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: 4Eyes on November 20, 2011, 03:42:40 PM
http://www.ysearchblog.com/2011/11/18/site-explorer-reminder/

Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Zwart on November 20, 2011, 05:37:40 PM
Ugh, now I'm gonna have to change my standard forum answer to people wondering about Google's link: command. Blast!
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: littleman on November 20, 2011, 07:36:13 PM
That's a shame.  What is next in line quality wise that is free and easy?
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: ukgimp on November 20, 2011, 09:40:16 PM
Personally I would have nuked all link commands in G and Y if I was running either of them. They give too much data to us.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: 4Eyes on November 20, 2011, 11:49:47 PM
I use MajesticSEO - on the minimum monthly fee - not sure if they offer it any more - paying around £14 a month
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: robert_charlton on November 21, 2011, 01:43:10 AM
For those not doing a continual volume of link-building or link research, the loss of a free tool like Yahoo's can hurt. 

At PubCon, Dixon showed me a new, more user-friendly interface for Majestic that's a little like SiteExplorer on steroids... extremely nice, but unfortunately not free.  I don't know whether that interface will be made available for analyzing your own site (or client sites you have access to). 

Bing's Duane Forrester (bingdude) mentioned in his PubCon presention that he hopes he can persuade Bing to come out with a tool like SiteExplorer that won't be limited to just data about one's own site.  It would be nice to have such a public tool available. 

I'm not a fan of SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer, so I can't say much about it.  Pretty limited capabilities, as I remember, with data that's about a month behind.  I think SEOmoz has the most to gain by providing a free tool, so it's possible it may get better.  Anyone experienced with it?  I don't think there's anything else, unless you count Blekko, which is basically self-censored and therefore limited, particularly for competitive research where you want to see why competitors are ranking.   

It would be ironic if Google were actually showing us most of the links it counts. 
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Rumbas on November 21, 2011, 09:26:43 AM
I'm using www.sitexploration.com as a tool in my set. Not free either, but very nice and built in our back yard.

Have a go and I might be able to swing an account or two.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: hungrygoose on November 21, 2011, 12:30:38 PM
Sad day.  When starting out in SEO, YSE was invaluable.  I spent probably weeks looking though 1000s of sites and their links, and the links of their links.  Going to make it harder for newbies to get started IMO. 

This is going to make competitor research crazy hard, Openexplorer IMO is trash and majestic is just inaccurate.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Drastic on November 21, 2011, 01:28:00 PM
Damn. We knew this day would come, but still.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Brad on November 21, 2011, 01:51:14 PM
So is there an opportunity here? Can a low cost site explorer for newbes be cobbled together by someone from th3core?
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: hungrygoose on November 21, 2011, 02:45:55 PM
there has to be an opp for a good link extractor.  code wise its probably fairly easy just to scrape the internet and store what sites link to what, but the actual task of building that database with server costs would be massive... wouldnt it?
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: 4Eyes on November 21, 2011, 03:22:29 PM
Quote
there has to be an opp for a good link extractor.  code wise its probably fairly easy just to scrape the internet and store what sites link to what, but the actual task of building that database with server costs would be massive... wouldnt it?

That is what MajesticSEO set out to do - and, yes, the cost and effort is very significant.

I always preferred Majestic to Yahoo anyway - neither were great though
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Drastic on November 21, 2011, 04:07:41 PM
Huge opp requiring huge resources. Definitely there though.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Brad on November 21, 2011, 09:25:12 PM
Blekko.com may become the new, beginner/small webmaster, tool.  Not as extensive as Yahoo Site Explorer but it does have some data as to who is linking to a given site, which is better than nothing. Plus free.
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Rooftop on November 22, 2011, 02:03:21 PM
YSE has been next to useless for me for a while anyway.  I've been training up a new link builder for the last few weeks and YSE didn't even make the tools list.

Currently (as of this week) I'm using Raven research central.  It provides a mashup of majestic + seomoz data.  Not perfect, particularly as a v.new tool. Looking promising though.

Very tempted by siteexploration. However I have a natural aversion to giving card details in order to do a free trial, so I have never tried it yet. 
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: Rupert on November 23, 2011, 07:02:00 AM
found this today: reverseinternet.com anyone tried it?
Title: Re: Yahoo Site Explorer Shutting down this Monday
Post by: BoL on November 23, 2011, 08:49:20 AM
Definitely significant cost in spidering the wild web. There would be significant programming time too. It would seem easy on face value to have a list of URLs and an index of what links link to whom, anchor text and other metadata. I think the big issue is how to determine your crawl lists, what deserves more frequent spidering, how to avoid spider traps, bad .htaccess rules and low quality pages. Ive tried most of the paid link tools sparingly and although they boast a high volume of URLs, some of them havent been crawled in a while.

I guess doing your costing/projections, you could say 'fetching 100 billion URLs a month' would be a good target. A couple of thousand spiders and off you go. Majestic claims to have feched 0.3 billion URLs and found over 3.5 trillion.