Today you may have read the news about imminent shutdown of Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE). The “Big Name” SEOs have been tweeting and saying on Google+ that Majestic SEO must be dancing on the tables. Let’s just say we knew it was coming and we have been preparing for years. We think you will be pleasantly surprised with our version. Now that the announcement is made, let’s just compare how many links we have to the announcement in our index compared to the links Yahoo are reporting themselves: (Our fresh index gets updated two or three times a day, as does Yahoo, so the number may have varied by the time you read this article.)

Who’s the King?

Majestic Site Explorer reporting 68 links

compared to

Yahoo Site Explorer reporting 45 links

We think those numbers speak for themselves! (Snapshot: 4:30 PM GMT, 11/7/2011)

So how did Majestic SEO go about beating Yahoo Site Explorer?

Well it wasn’t overnight!

Yahoo Site Explorer was launched in late 2005, approximately a year before Majestic started its own work on back links analysis. For some time we tracked our index growth and compared it with them:

It took another year to finally match index size of Yahoo in middle of 2008. Year later in 2009 we have become the only 2nd company in the world to announce trillion URL index.

After that our focus shifted to beating Yahoo on freshness culminating in launch of our fresh index in March 2011. What can better illustrate that we’ve bested the gold standard of link checking? L

Later this week we’ll publish details to help port applications using Yahoo API to Majestic API, stay tuned.

Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, long live Majestic Site Explorer!

Alex
Latest posts by Alex (see all)

Comments

  • Kyle Alm

    Yahoo’s link index has been largely useless for several years, glad they decided to just get rid of it.

    July 11, 2011 at 6:08 pm
  • Sebastian Zinke

    🙂 Long live Majestic !!!

    July 11, 2011 at 8:25 pm
  • Philip Broadhead

    Does this mean that more brands that offer site explorer data are going to come more in line with Majestic SEO or are they too going to fall by the wayside?

    July 12, 2011 at 11:38 am
    • Dixon

      This will be latrgely their decision, not Majestic’s. All I can say is that we believe we have perhaps the strongest data of this sort on the planet and will continue to deveop and innovate.

      July 12, 2011 at 11:48 am
  • Asim Bawany

    thankfully, I learned very early in my IM career that the Yahoo site explorer was literally useless when compared to Majestic’s…

    I already see popular SEO softwares starting to get their link data from majestic instead of yahoo.

    If Yahoo had not pulled the trigger, YSE was headed towards abandonment anyways…

    July 17, 2011 at 8:45 pm
  • Scott

    Following these same links just now shows big count increases, however, there are more at your Yahoo link (817) than at your own (498) – What’s up w/ that?

    July 19, 2011 at 9:47 pm
    • Dixon

      Scott – always the watchdog! 🙂
      Yep – as I look right now, Yahoo is saying about 1,200 links to our 510… but look what happens when you look at those links on yahoo in detail. I downloaded the top 1000 into excel and sorted by URL. I can see that Yahoo is being hit with lots of non-accurate data now. Buzzurl.jp and subdomains thereof account for over half of the 1000 results returned by Yahoo. I see another 60 of them coming from pages on the janquim.blogspot.com subdomain such as janquim.blogspot.com/2011/07/el-porc-secret-que-vaig-crear-al.html and the repetition continues.

      Right this second, our 510 links are coming from 166 referring domains. I went through the top 1000 links reported by Yahoo and tried to work out how many unique domains they are reporting. It would seem that they have a little less referring domains than us in their top 1000 links. Of course – they may overtake us in the extra bunch they don’t give us, but I am confident that most of the excess links Yahoo are now showing are pretty well honey-bot urls (The Yahoo crawler indexed the same stuff again and again with different urls)

      When you get to the bottom of the barrel in crawl, you will always get results like this – but I think Majestic has been able to demonstrate now that we are picking up the real links pretty quickly and importantly – we are picking up the referring domains.

      July 20, 2011 at 1:58 pm
  • Brian Greenberg

    Congratulations! You now have the best index out there. At the very least, volumes of new customers for you guys to get at the link data. And many more api customers to be used in other apps.

    July 20, 2011 at 11:52 am
  • Tom Andrews

    Sad to see it go, outdated and data which was quite hard to use in comparison to great sites like Majestic, however in some ways like an old SEO friend!

    However, still a decent quick reference to see number of links clients site and competitors have, which was free to explore up to 1000 links deep 🙂

    July 21, 2011 at 8:38 pm
  • tempat berlibur

    Congratulations! You dont have formidable opponent anymore.. LOL

    August 5, 2011 at 4:49 am

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