When Yahoo and Bing first announced they would partner up many in the industry expected this was bad news for Yahoo Site Explorer. That would inevitably be shut down. It took a while but Yahoo now indeed has announced it will be closing Yahoo Site Explorer.
The closing down of Site Explorer means that Yahoo is directing all their users over to Bing Webmaster Center which should be the default place from now on for site owners when it comes to Bing and Yahoo.
Even though originally Yahoo announced that Site Explorer would not be killed, in the end they did.
On their blog Yahoo explains the move:
“We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value. Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”
Yahoo is not shutting down Site Explorer in one day, they are gradually moving things over to Webmaster Center. When all markets are integrated to to the Microsoft Search platform later this year Site Explorer will shut down entirely. The API will be shut down September 15, 2011.
That also means that you can still use Site Explorer for a while. Yahoo even stresses that:
“In a large part of the world, we have not yet transitioned to Microsoft search platform. Hence, it is important that Yahoo! continues to receive your site/sitemap submissions so that search results from Yahoo! are fresh and relevant for markets that have not switched over.”
The end of an era
Yahoo (or should we say Microsoft?) ‘killing’ Site Explorer is truly an end of an era. Yahoo Site Explorer has been the place for many SEOs where they started out their link-research, not just for their own sites, but especially also for their competitors websites.
It is unclear if Bing Webmaster Center will be offering the same functionalities, chances are they will not. Which means SEOs will be looking in a different direction, like commercial tools such as Majestic SEO or Linkdex or agencies.