Basic Seo : Using Yahoo Site Explorer As A Google Link Monitor

[Martin Goulding]

At present Yahoo Site Explorer is the most up to date link tracker and potentially*"Do Follow" link checker (*more on this later ) that is available , many tools use this API(1) , which is freely available to do what you can do manually If you wish to investigate this highly useful tool yourself without using one of the many tools available, the information below may be of interest.

How to use it: If you are not familiar with this tool , it can easily be overlooked .

Go to: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Enter the URL you wish to find backlinks to

Submit ( best leave off www )

The first page that comes up will be all the pages currently indexed in Yahoo ( if it is in there )

Next click on Inlinks ( if they are showing a number )

In the 2 boxes below Inlinks check Except for this domain and Entire site

This will bring up all the pages that Yahoo has found, that currently display incoming links to the domain you are checking

Most of the pages linking to this site may also be counted by Google in its PageRank algorithm and perhaps anchor text links ( depending on whether the link contains text rather than only the URL itself)

Google is a lot slower at revealing what sites it counts as a link , but it is a fair bet that most of the sites listed as Yahoo Inlinks will also be counted by Google.There may be some variation, for sure, so thats why I say most of these links will be counted, in other words a good indication is given

The other information revealed by these Yahoo Inlinks is that they **may be (see update bottom of page ) what is now commonly called by SEO enthusiasts "Do Follow" links . Or links that may be counted as PageRank votes to the site being investigated If you wish to read up on (commonly called) " No Follow " and " Do Follow" links go here

Of course there are other reasons Inlinks won't show up in the Yahoo Inlinks index , such as for one reason or another the site itself or associated pages are not in the Yahoo index itself.

Yahoo Site Explorer will list any new links found usually within a few days and often within 24 hours or sooner , there may even be some ranking algorithm in the numerical order the Inlinks themselves are displayed. You can also use a tool such as SEOquake to review the apparent Google PageRank of each link

Yahoo Site Explorer is by no means a perfect tool , but it is one that can provide a degree of useful information about the the number and status of incoming links and once you have started to use it for this purpose , it will very likely become part of your SEO daily routine.

** Update May 25th : Found several Yahoo Inlinks that are definitely , "rel-no follow" listed in the incoming links against this site. This has only happened in the last few days and will monitor to see if they get filtered in future .

[masynee]

Great tip Martin. I've also been using SiteExplorer to check my links. Very useful.

[seo4china]

Yeah quite useful to get the number of links and domains they are from, but quite far from what a professional SEO would need as there are no information on the quality of those links.

[masynee]

Originally Posted by seo4china

Yeah quite useful to get the number of links and domains they are from, but quite far from what a professional SEO would need as there are no information on the quality of those links.

There is a FireFox add on, the name escapes me for now, but it is free and adds details on the quality of the links. I have used it and found it quite useful. It slows the load time though.

[jenniec]

Originally Posted by masynee

There is a FireFox add on, the name escapes me for now, but it is free and adds details on the quality of the links. I have used it and found it quite useful. It slows the load time though.

Are you perhaps thinking of SearchStatus? It is a great plug in for FireFox and gives all sorts of PR/link/traffic/Alexa info etc...I would link to it but I'm not sure your policy on new members linking.

In any event, I think the plugin in an invaluable tool for anyone interested in SEO, and I haven't seen too much of a lag w/ page loading.