Tag - seo tools

Free Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

As we all know, Yahoo Site Explorer, the most loved tool of everybody, who knows what search engine optimization and internet marketing is, has been destroyed by Microsoft. It was mentioned about a year ago that it was going to be decommissioned, but no one wanted to believe in it. But it finally has happened and we cannot use this wonderful tool any more.

So, from now on, you cannot check backlinks for your website or for your competitors for free. You can still access Site Explorer if you have a web master account at Bing, but it would be only for your own websites.

If you take a look at SEO forums around the Internet, you will see that everyone is in shock out there. The only thing they are talking about is what kinds of alternatives are available out there and especially what you can find there for free.

Of cause there is nothing there that can compete with what Site Explorer could do for us, but we will show you some free alternatives, which webmasters can use to check backlinks to their websites.

List of free alternatives for Yahoo Site Explorer:

1. Link Diagnostics

First tool, which worth mentioning is Link Diagnostics : linkdiagnosis.com.

 

This is the best free backlinks checker tool, which we have been able to find so far. It takes its results from Linkscape, so the results are similar to Open Site Explorer.

There are some limitations to it, like, if you want to see all seomoz parameters for each backlinks, then you will have to use Firefox and install an appropriate plugin for it.

Another limitation is, that it uses ajax, so it is not possible to load backlinks data programmatically. Probably you could overcome it, but they have done it a little bit more difficult for us.

2. Blekko

Next free tool for checking backlinks would be blekko.com.

They are positioning themselves as a search engine, aiming to replace Google, but it is definitely too early to talk about it. This website can be used in many different ways and has other Search Engine Optimization tools, but let’s focus on backlinks checker for now.

We thought it could be a good free alternative for those, who uses an automated process for checking backlinks, but after couple of days since yahoo had gone they added an authentication on their website. So, the only way you can use their features is to register and login to their site.

This makes it pretty useless for those wanting to analyse a lot of sites. They also do not have as much information as Yahoo Site Explorer had and quite often they do not have any information for smaller websites, but still it is a nice tool to know.

There are some other free tools available, but we did not see anything, that worth talking about. We are going to investigate some comercial tools in the nearest features, so you will be able to get better understanding on what tools, like Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and other can do for you.