For more than 6 years VisionCourse, SEO professionals, and anyone else interested in their website’s one way anchor linking strength used Yahoo’s Site explorer tool…now, no longer.
Anchor linking is still one of the most important elements of creating “relevancy” for web businesses. Through strategically placed links on high ranking blogs, articles, directories, competitive sites and many other techniques, the one thing in common was that we were able to track the progress of the anchor link growth with Yahoo! Site explorer. This was a free tool that not only enabled us to view one way in links, but to also get a better sense of our own internal link structure as well.
As of November 19th, in conjunction with the bigger merge between Yahoo! And Bing, Yahoo has decided to shut down the tool. This truly ends a simple way for web marketing experts to check on progress of link building.
At Vision Course, we are constantly on the search to seek out the next tools that will assist in the overall SEO processes, and to be as transparent as possible with our clients. We have come up with a couple of solutions that we want to share with our audience that there are still some free, and paid, tools to replace this.
Two anchor link checkers we would like to share with you are as follows:
- Backlinkwatcher.com – Free and fast. Does have advertisements that will drive you nuts, but its free and provides solid link checking similar to Yahoo’s
- SEOattack.org. has a limited free version and reasonably priced.
It is our understanding at Vision Course that (with a little bit of wishful thinking) Bing will release either the old tool with upgrades or the exact same functionality in due time; however, as with all mergers, I am sure they are evaluating how they can turn that into a better paid model to create a new revenue stream to make up for the Google domination factor.
Either way, Vision Course will keep you up-to-date as soon as we hear something. Keep checking your anchor links and keep moving ecommerce forward!
Tags: SEO, Yahoo, Yahoo Site Explorer
