Yahoo launches Site Explorer - a backlink analysis tool

Yahoo has launched a backlink tool called Site Explorer (beta) , which will give you a list of all the sites that link to a specific URL. Happy days for search engine marketers...

By using it we've found that we have around 180,000 websites linking to E-consultancy. However, dig a little deeper and you find that the figures include a lot of internal links, so the true figure (for a site with a good internal linking strategy) will always be lower. 

At present there's no obvious way of removing E-consultancy domains from the Site Explorer search. You could do this on Google when looking up backlinks by adding a NOT function to your search term. Maybe Yahoo will add a toggle feature to allow this in the future.

Any tips on how to look at external sites only from our search wizards?

The results
Sites seem to be ordered on the basis of authority (which makes me think that we'll never see a similar tool from Google, although some search industry watchers think otherwise). 

It might also be an idea for Yahoo Site Explorer to provide users with the option of ordering the results on the basis of date, so you can quickly see who has been linking to your website this week / last month / this year.

Certainly Yahoo's on the money in terms of recency of indexing, picking up sites that have only just started linking to us this week, as recently as Wednesday 28 September.

Yahoo Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

PS - 'inlinks' = 'backlinks'

c.

Chris Lake
Editor, E-consultancy.com

Here is another great free seo tool:
http://www.jnbwebpromotion.com/analysis_tool.htm

Regards,
John

On 16:07:38 5 October 2005 chrisl wrote:

 

Another handy URL tool (with thanks to SERoundtable):
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/

This one grabs the link and then the anchor text. 

c.