Most people in the SEO space love Yahoo Site Explorer. While most will agree that Google is much more efficient and accurate at crawling the Internet and finding links (as well as weighting them). Yahoo has been much more generous than Google at sharing their backlink data. And if there is one thing SEO's need, it's backlink analysis.
Our SEO reseller partners are also eager to see what type of backlink analysis tools we can provide them. As they go out to sell search engine optimization services, they know that links to your site are critical.. Of course onsite SEO is also critical. If you want the full story on the differences between onsite SEO and offsite SEO, read my previous posts.
We are big fans of SEOMoz. We subscribe to their Linkscape Pro product. It is very helpful for developing sophisticated backlink analysis strategies. I'm a particular fan of their root domain backlink count statistic. I find it to be much more accurate than a raw number of backlink counts (which does not take into account the diversity of domain names linking). You can clearly jack-up your total backlink count with a few site-wide footer or blogroll links from websites with thousands of pages each. But is that really as good as a thousand hyperlinks from different domains? I don't think so.
So the big announcement from Yahoo is that they are closing down their Site Explorer APi service in December 2010. This is a big blow to many tools that have been built around the Site Explorer service. And it leaves many people wondering where they are going to get their backlink information from after the Site Explorer API is gone. As mentioned, we pull data from SEOMoz, so our SEO resellers should not be too worried. Additionally, we are always seeking new and interesting APIs to integrate into our core SEO reseller technology offering. Just this month we started piloting our social media monitoring product. We've been talking about the role of social media in both PPC and SEO campaigns for a long time. We are pleased to be piloting a new social media monitoring approach with the hopes of a full launch in December, 2010.