Yahoo Site Explorer to be Turned Off – Bad News for SEO

Yahoo Site Explorer will be turned off in 2012, it has been announced.

In case you missed it, Yahoo and Microsoft have made a deal to integrate their search engines (Yahoo and Bing).

The end result of a deal signed a little over one year ago by the two companies has gone ahead so that Yahoo will now be powered by the Bing search. In the US this means that  combined, Microsoft now owns 28.1% of the search market and Google with 65.8% (in the UK Google has over 90% of the market).

The implementation of the change to the search, which has been in testing for about a month, is currently live only in the U.S.A and Canada, with “other worldwide locations and languages to come in the weeks and months ahead,” according to a statement from Microsoft.

Although there should not be massive differences to the search features from a users point of view, you’ll notice if you look at the status bar in your browser that data is indeed being loaded from Bing.

“End of Site Explorer”

Unfortunately they have announced the shut down of the incredibly useful tool “Yahoo Site Explorer” .

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven’t yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period.

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites…

See the original blog post from Yahoo here

What does this mean for SEO guru’s and Website Owners?

Well for a start the useful site explorer features like the back link commands will be affected. Currently it is the most effective and accurate backlink search tool on the net.

One good thing though is that if you have been monitoring Bing Webmaster Tools recently you will have noticed some changes to the features and layout, so maybe it will compensate for Yahoo Site Explorer going under…….