We knew it was coming so it should be no surprise, but Yahoo Site Explorer announced that it was shutting down today, and a number of SEO professionals who have relied on the information about website links and pages indexed will have to start paying for it now. Since Yahoo Site Explorer was the only free service that let anyone see this information, it made competitive research about websites easy and affordable. However, Yahoo Site Explorer will be incorporated into Bing Webmaster Tools now, showing only the sites a person owns.
Here at Boomtown Internet Group we’ve decided to switch over to using either the SEOMoz tool called Open Site Explorer with plans starting at $99 a month, or the link analysis tool from Majestic SEO that starts at around $45 per month for 60 domains.
You may want a more robust link-building tool like Link Research Tools , which starts at $29 for 72 hours of use. Yahoo Site Explorer will certainly be missed. Some SEO experts have suggested that Bing should reinstate the tool for free, and for that, they would willingly switch over from Google searching to Bing – at least while they were researching links.