"I Googled it."
Yes, we know. Google won the search war. Yahoo, the front runner not long ago, has been toppled. For those not in the know or clinging on to the final shreds of Yahoo's independence were greeted with a harsh blow this last week. For those of us who have done work in the SEO world over the years, it was the final nail in the coffin to see this greeting us when we tried to use Yahoo's Site Explorer - the Bing migration apparently complete...
Uh...who cares?
I do, for one. Plenty of other SEOs as well. Believe it or not, Yahoo was really the only major search engine that made itself SEO friendly. Don't believe me? Here are two reasons we'll miss Yahoo.
- Site Explorer's backlink data. There quite simply is no replacement for this. I've seen other people saying there are other tools that can do the same thing, but none of them gave you quick, recent backlink data even on fairly obscure pages and domains. I love Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer, but they're either too full of noise (Majestic) or not as expansive or current (OSE) to be good for quick backlink data gathering. For example, just last week I was looking to pitch a new job resource for a client to other interested sites. Yahoo's Site Explorer was my tool of choice for finding backlinks to similar resources that would find ours valuable...This was pretty niche stuff, and Yahoo gave me hundreds of targets quickly, the other tools? Not so much...
- The linkdomain operator. I can't stress how valuable this was for link building. There is no other tool that allowed you to run a contextual search on a site's backlinks in seconds. If you're unfamiliar, what this means is you could run a simple search like - "linkdomain:mycompetitor.com directory" and Yahoo would limit your search results to pages that link to yourcompetitor.com's domain for the general query "directory". The result of this? More than likely, a whole bunch of links your competitor already has from directories. If you wanted to make it more worth your while you could add "-linkdomain:myownsite.com" to the query and it would remove results that also link to your own site. This could obviously be expanded to much more than directories, but that was a great way to find some easy links early in the linkbuilding process. You could combine that operator multiple times to find pages that were linking to multiple competitors to find some other places that should be linking to you as well (we like to call these c0-citations in the biz) - "linkdomain:competitor1.com linkdomain:competitor2.com". I'm getting depressed just typing this...
The market continues to consolidate it seems, as we're down to only two major players at this point with Bing barely being able to make that claim. There is some hope, however, as some SEO friendlier engines continue to try to make their presence known. Blekko, in particular is providing some high hopes as they offer up search operators that provide all kinds of interesting backlinking data (check it out at blekko.com and do a search for "cnn.com /seo" and get all kinds of information on CNN's backlink profile - cool stuff!). Some SEOs have crafted clever workarounds for what's no longer available via Yahoo, but until someone can craft something that makes me forget the awesome power of Yahoo for SEO...some of us will continue to mourn our old friend.