YAHOO DISMANTLING THEIR SEO TOOLKIT?

Paul Carpenter 20th December 2006
Paul Carpenter

Link research is one of the necessary (if a little dull!) parts of any effective search engine promotion campaign. Looking at who links to who gives you valuable insight into the state of a market and where to target your own linking strategy. Each of the search engines has offered you a way to perform this easily enough - but now it seems Yahoo is bowing out.

UPDATE: You can still find backlinks in Yahoo after all, but you must use their specialist 'site explorer' search.

To find out which sites link to which, Google is no good. The command is simple enough: just type "link:www.9xb.com" into the search box and theoretically you see all the sites that link to this domain. Unfortunately, Google's secrecy card comes into play, and you will only actually see a partial sample of the links that Google can track.

So for the last year or two, Yahoo's similar "linkdomain:www.9xb.com" has been a much better tool.

However, it seems that over the last few days Yahoo has quietly dropped this ability. That search now just shows pages listed by Yahoo on the domain itself. An interesting move, and one that will serve to further put the blinkers on SEOs trying to track links and understand how traffic and rankings are being built.

More than ever, we in the industry will need to look beyond automated tools that served us so well for so long. On the plus side, perhaps it will enhance our mystique....

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