Drop in Yahoo Site Explorer Link Stats

Over the last week there has been a significant drop in the number of links being reported in the Yahoo Site Explorer Tool.

Many SEO’s have been wondering how the Yahoo Site Explorer tool would function once Bing begins to power Yahoo search results.

For those of you that were relying on the Site Explorer tool to gain insight into your link count – well, you will have to keep holding your breath for now.

An official statement on the Yahoo notice board says:

We are working with the Microsoft team to ensure that webmasters can continue to use Yahoo! Site Explorer to view inlinks (a.k.a backlinks) to a given webpage or a website and to further be able to export them as CSV if desired.

Please note that this functionality will be available only through the Site Explorer UI and not through the Webservices API .

The good news is that the official statement says that they are working to resume the service in some capacity… however, I think that we can kiss goodbye to the Yahoo links tool as we once new it.

The extra good news is that it really is not too much of a big deal!! If you think SEO is all about the length of your link list then take this as an opportunity to consider new ways to approach your search engine optimisation.