I have been messing about on the Internet for a few years now. Due to my complete lack of technical skills I naturally fell into blogging and building up information based websites. This is also something that I thoroughly enjoy, I may not be the best of writers, but I do love to waffle!
Anyway, way back when, sometime in 2006 shortly after I bought my first domains (Whois tells me that I bought Webologist on 20th June 2006, it is over 5 years old!) I must have typed those immortal words into Altavista (OK, I admit have been using Google since about 1999, before it even got popular), “how do I get my site to appear in Google?”. Or something like that.
That search led me into the world of SEO. Actually, I am not sure what came first, but I recall my cousin, who has been running Contractor Calculator for many years, told me that I needed to learn about SEO if I want people to find my site via the search engines. I cannot remember who first told me about links and Yahoo! site explorer, probably someone from the many SEO forums I have loitered in over the years.
For those that do not know, Yahoo! Site Explorer was always the best free way to look at the backlinks for a website. It showed pretty much all the links pointing to a website, even the rubbish directory links that are not worth the paper that they are not written on. Today Yahoo! Site Explorer died.
There is is above, how the page looks today. Even yesterday I was using it to look at backlinks for a site, trying to determine if I should invest some time in writing a guest post for them. Now I will have to use other metrics to determine if a site is likely to be getting more or less traffic than others. Not sure which yet, but I do not plan on breaking Rule Number One.
Rule Number One, being the first and only rule I set when I started out online, was to not pay for anything. The reason really was simply because I knew that I would get ripped off if I did. I really knew nothing about the Internet, but I did know that a lot of products that sound too good to be true are.
I have of course broken my one and only rule many times since 2006. The first major breach of the rule book was to buy a listing in the Yahoo! directory. With the demise of so many Yahoo! products I am starting to wonder if it is not time I stopped giving them $300 a year to list my site on their apparently dying brand.
Anyway, that’s that, as they say. Yahoo Site Explorer is Dead! What are the alternatives?
Well, to look at your own sites for free you can use Majestic SEO (funny, just noticed that they have “site explorer” in their page title, I guess hoping to win some of Yahoo’s traffic). Their rate were not too bad last time I looked for inspecting competitors, but if you check lots then it will add up quick. Then there is the Open Site Explorer which you access direct or also via SEOMoz’s toolbar for Firefox. Another one is the Blekko search engine links information. After that, everything is pretty much a paid thing.
Out of all of those, I like the look for Blekko. Don’t ask me which lot of data is best, I do not know. Blekko is free and provides some interesting information. That is good enough for my needs.
