It’s the end of an era… Yahoo! Site Explorer, the SEO’s go-to tool for discovering competitors backlinks has come down. YSE quickly gained popularity since Google’s link command was known for not being very accurate (Matt Cutts, head of the Google spam team said this was because “we didn’t have the storage space“) and only showing a few backlinks. Google’s link command would show you, 10 links or maybe 0, despite knowing that more were out there, however, YSE could report thousands. I personally have visited Yahoo! thousands of times just to use this tool. Now that has all changed.
Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance
This is all part of the rollout for the search alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft’s. Yahoo! states that YSE has been migrated into Bing Webmaster Tools, however, you can only see backlinks for sites that you have verified as an owner. So any sites that you control, you can still get a somewhat accurate report of the number of backlinks, but you will not be able to spy on your competitors like you once use to be able to.
Reverse Engineering your Competition’s SEO
The YSE shutdown hasn’t really changed the game, but it has changed the players. A huge part of SEO is reverse engineering your competitors backlink profile. For example, lets say you want to rank for,”seo palm beach”. You go to Google and find the top ranking websites. For roughly the past 8 years, you would plug those sites into YSE and see all the juicy links that helped those websites get to the top. You would make a list of those links and then try to get your site on them as well. YSE no longer works, but there are other solutions available.
What Now?
Now that YSE is gone, SEO’s will be flooding the other solutions. These are not new, they have been around for a couple years and are used by many SEOs. Both have free versions with limited stats and paid versions with additional features and reporting.
Conclusion
Thousands of webmasters and SEOs will no longer need to visit Yahoo! on a regular basis. The game hasn’t changed but the players have. Reverse engineering your competitor’s backlink profile lives on 
What other solutions have you found?
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