The reason I'm talking about this tool today is because recently Yahoo! made some significant upgrades to it. Upgrades to help you see what Yahoo! sees in relation to your website.

When you go to the Site Explorer site you will see a fairly simple interface. Here you can enter any URL you want to look at to see what Yahoo! sees.

For example, when I put the URL for this site I see that we have 839 pages indexed. Now while this isn't new - you could do this in a regular Yahoo! search - there are other interesting things.

If I click on the 'Inlinks' link, I can see that Yahoo! has just over 2,600 links for the root domain.

Further, if I exclude all internal links (a sweet new feature that no one else does) I can see that there are 1,563 external links pointing to the root domain. But wait, it gets better.

When I chose to show all external links only for the whole site, I can see that we have 2,645.

This is great for me to know because now I see that there are about 1,100 external links likely pointing to other articles on this site.

So that's the domain, what about specific pages? Yup you can explore those as well.

A while back, during the height of the Florida Update, we did a series of articles breaking down the update, so we could see what was happening. We then shared our findings.

Well it turns out that almost 100 sites linked to this one article alone. And you can do this with any URL - either yours or your competitors.

And there's another thing I've noticed about siteexplorer. It appears that Yahoo! may be applying the ranking algorithms to the listings.

You see, the most popular article linked to on our site is the Florida Update article mentioned above. So it comes as no surprise that when you explore the root URL it is the second listed page. The third listed page is our articles archive page which also has lots of incoming links.

Going down the list of URLs it seems that Yahoo! has ordered them in importance, based on the number of incoming links from outside sources.

Now, I can't say this is the truth, it's only what I've observed when playing with it.

Also, why don't you combine the output of the site explorer with something like Xenu which is a very effective site crawler?

For example, what if your site has 1000 pages in Google but only 800 in Yahoo? Well, you could use Xenu to crawl your site to see if there are barriers to indexing. Then, if you do find them, fix them. You should see the page count in site explorer rise over time.

Now to a point I made earlier - you can use this tool for some great competitive intelligence gathering. Do you have a competitor that's ranking higher than you and you don't know why? Why not plug the URL of the ranking page into site explorer to see why?

Perhaps it just has a bunch more external links, or perhaps its internal link strategy is influencing it.

If it's external links, then why don't you export a list (yes you can export to a TSV) and start seeing if you can request links from some of the same sites?

Even before doing this, why not use site explorer on a few of these URL's to see what makes them so important. Perhaps you could skip a few sites and request links from sites which link to them instead?

If you haven't already, I'd suggest that you take some time to play with Site Explorer. I think you'll be fairly surprised at the amount of data you can gather both about your site and also your competitors sites.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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