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Examining Yahoo!'s Site Explorer Tool:
How it Can Help You
By Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
» Click here for  PDF &  Word Versions
Webmaster tools are becoming a hot topic in the major search
engines these days. It is becoming increasingly obvious to search
engine companies that they need to begin listening to webmasters
and provide more tools to ensure future brand integrity. It
is about time! I have been waiting for the search engines to
wise up and over the past couple of years both Google and Yahoo
have begun to prominently feature such tools. This article is
devoted to Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool and how you can
harness it to help you improve your search engine rankings and
improve your odds for online success.
THEN: September 29th, 2004 
Yahoo! officially launched Yahoo Site Explorer (see
release).
This new tool was designed to promote feedback between webmasters
and Yahoo search staff. Ever since Yahoo! launched and became
the powerhouse it is today it has had a rather bleak reputation
for responding to customer search inquiries and ranking or
directory complaints; this is another great step they took
to change public opinion.
When it launched in 2005, Yahoo! Site Explorer provided a central
interface for the following:
-
List all subpages of a site domain
(domain.com) or path (domain.com/~yourname)
-
Backlinks (or
inlinks as Yahoo calls them) for both site
domains and paths.
-
Free submission of sites not indexed yet by Yahoo.
Submissions can be done either
one at a time or by bulk. The bulk
method requires that you
identify the location (URL) of an online text
file with the list of URLs to be submitted.
-
Download up to
1000 search results in TSV format (TSV can
be read by Excel)
NOW: August 8th, 2006 – New
and Improved!
Yahoo has announced a fairly dramatic update to this service
which provides more tools and a cleaner operating environment.
Yahoo Site Explorer has added the following new capabilities:
-
Additional information about each page within your associated
website(s):
- “Last Crawled Date”: This is the last time your
page was indexed by Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo’s robot).
- “Language”: the language of the page (a
waste of space in my opinion)
- Show pages from subdomains: this will list any subdomains
that Yahoo has identified and will allow you to choose
between seeing indexing results on “all subdomains” or “only
this domain”. This is merely a filtering feature.
-
RSS Feed Submission: submit your RSS
or Atom feeds and manage them from your Site Explorer control
panel.
-
Automated page update notification service (info
link): designed
for the Yahoo Developer Network this is useful only to
those that have automated applications that can interface
with
Yahoo!’s
API. This service allows you to tell Yahoo when your pages
have been updated so that it knows when to recrawl.
IMPORTANT: this new information is only available if you have
authenticated your website. How
to authenticate your site on Yahoo Site Explorer is covered
here.
Getting Down to Business: How Yahoo Site Explorer Can Help You!
There are two main areas that I want to focus on in regards
to how Yahoo Site Explorer can help you. |
 1. The “MySite” Area – Your Own Websites
This following points require that you have authenticated your
website(s). Click on Figure 1.0 to see what this screen will
look like if your site(s) are authenticated.
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The first and most obvious advantage of
seeing your sites in Yahoo Site Explorer is verifying
which pages
have been indexed. If you find that many pages of your
site are missing this may be a great indication that your
site
is not search engine friendly. Is your site search
engine friendly?
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The ‘inlinks’ (aka. backlinks) option is
a fantastic way to view the links pointing to your website.
The best part is that unlike the linkdomain: search that
Yahoo offered before, you can actually download up to
1000
results in a small file that you can then filter with
Excel or your spreadsheet application of choice. Why is
this helpful?
First of all this is an effective means of determining
which sites are providing the most links to your website.
These
websites are obviously very interested in your product/services
so perhaps contacting them and strengthening that relationship
would be a good idea. |
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Again the inlinks has another advantage; determining
which sites you should appear on *more* often. Let me
explain
by describing this review step by step because this is
a little bit advanced but well worth the minimal learning
curve. (If you find the following information just too
much to handle keep in mind that StepForth offers professional
website analytics and competitor
analysis services to
take the work out of your hands.) |
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1) Look at the referrer information in your website
statistics and write down the sites that appear to
be driving a lot of traffic to your website.
2) Now, download the inlink data from Yahoo Site Explorer for your website (up
to 1000 results can be downloaded) in TSV format.
3) Open the TSV file in your local spreadsheet program and sort the results by
website.
4) Now that the website results are sorted alphabetically try to find any sites
from your list of top referrers that are standing out as having particularly
few links to your site.
5) If you have found a site that has a high ratio of traffic to backlinks then
you might have just stumbled on a gold mine. Say what? Just consider what you
have found for a moment. Here is the situation; a particular website has few
links pointing to your site but it is still delivering a high level of traffic.
Armed with this information your next step should be to figure out how to get
more links from that site. Perhaps the webmaster will be interested in providing
more exposure to your site freely or for a low advertising cost. You simply never
know unless you research the site and/or contact the webmaster. |
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And keep in mind that even if you don’t find
any goldmines you are still learning a lot more about
your target
market such as which sites they frequent and what information
appears to be of interest to them; which is always helpful. |
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You can submit your RSS feed if you have a blog. This
is a great way to be certain that your feed is being spidered
by Yahoo. |
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Are you curious why a particular page in your website
is being used as an access point? Try typing in that page’s
address into the search bar in Site Explorer and if that
page has been indexed by Yahoo it will appear. Now click
on the inlinks report for that page and you will have
a complete listing of the websites that are linking to
that
page. Look at each inlink page and you will get a better
idea of why your site page is becoming an entry point.
This research method is nothing new but this quicker approach
is slick. |
 2.
The “MySite” Area – Your Competitor’s
Website
The following points focus on the analysis of your competitors
so site authorization is not required. Figure 2.0 provides an
example of the screen when you are viewing a site you have not
been authorized for.
Are you curious what your competitors are
up to? Recently I wrote an article on how
to conduct your own competitor analysis and
I wish I had included Site Explorer’s
features in it. Here is how I use Yahoo Site Explorer
to check in on the
competition. After I have shown you how to get
the information I will explain what information
you
can glean from it.
1. Type
in the main domain of the competitor in Site
Explorer.
2.
From the competitor’s result screen click on ‘inlinks’ so
that you have the full inlinks (backlinks)
report on that competitor.
3.
Now just above the first set of results
you will see the following options that
allow you
to filter the inlink results:
The “From All Pages” means that you are seeing
inlinks from any page; including links from the competitor’s
site to its own site (internal pages linking to each other).
So in order to remove these links that don’t provide you
with any useful information you want to change this to “Except
from this domain” so that you are not getting internal
links showing up. This is how it will appear:
4. The resulting list will now show only external sites linking
to your competitor; a much more valuable report since you have
now removed backlink information that is useless to your research.
5. Next you have two options; one is to download as many
results as you can using the “Export Result to TSV” command
(usually only 50 or so will download) or you can begin reviewing
the sites visually, page by page. I would start with the
first step and then move on to manually reviewing the sites
within
Site Explorer after you have exhausted the first 50 that
are handily provided in spreadsheet format.
Okay you have this report… now what? Here 3 key pieces
of information you may find valuable:
1. Benefit from their Work: You can now
create a list of sites that your competitor(s) have managed
to get links from. Next
try to match these links by contacting each site’s
webmaster and asking if they would consider linking to your
website. This
is a great method for in-house link building.
2. Advertising Revealed: Have you noticed
that a large number of backlinks seem to be coming from a
particular domain? Look
into this domain closely; it could be that your competitor
is paying for a link which is directly converting to beneficial
backlinks. It may be worth contacting these site(s) and
requesting
pricing for advertising of your own. If advertising is not
possible then at the very least you now have a part of the
equation for
your competitor’s ranking successes (if they have
any).
3. Forums and Blogs: Keep an eye out for
backlinks from forums or blogs. These backlinks may indicate
a particularly useful
forum that could drive business to your website. It also
cannot hurt to benefit from the forum interaction by placing
a backlink
in your post signature (same as an email signature). Just
don’t
expect much of an advantage from signature backlinks because
rampant spam from unimaginative spammers has rendered such
links less important.
Yahoo Site Explorer is Now Unavoidable
For those that like to do research by hand you may be asking “why
would I use Site Explorer when I can perform my own research
by hand?” Yahoo Site Explorer has made itself somewhat
unavoidable since it began redirecting most searches for “link”, “site” or “linkdomain” to
Site Explorer which in-turn requires that you have a free Yahoo
account.
Summary
The tools provided within Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool may
not be ground breaking but they sure make certain forms of research
much easier. By making queries that used to be entirely manual
(link:, linkdomain:, site: etc.) available automatically they
have certainly made the world of competitor analysis that much
easier to experience for the average site owner.
Kudos Yahoo! I think you guys are definitely on the right track;
you have certainly earned thumbs up from me for this innovation.
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