If you’re a blogger and you’ve been following the news you may have heard about Yahoo shutting down its Site Explorer service on the 21^st of this month. As someone who depends a lot on the Yahoo Site Explorer, and who uses data from the tool to optimize my Yahoo small business and midphase coupon blog for better rankings the news came at the wrong time. Most of the tools I use rely on the Yahoo API for backlink data, and it will take quite some time for some of them to update and start working accurately.

Here’s the news quoted directly from the Yahoo Search Blog:

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.

That is probably the worst news any SEO person will want to hear, and I think the shutting down of Yahoo Site Explorer will affect bloggers alike. In this article, I give a few reasons why shutting down Yahoo Site Explorer is a loss to bloggers.

You Can’t Get Link Data on Bing

One major feature most of us use the Yahoo Site Explorer for is to get link data for both our websites and competitor websites. I do a lot of things to make my midphase coupon blog rank better in the search engines, but ultimately, the most effective thing I do is to take a look at my competitor backlink data to see what they are doing and why they are ranking better, and as a result implement the right changes to help me get better results. That has always worked for me, but I guess it will become a little bit difficult now that Site Explorer is gone.

Other Alternative Tools Cost a Fortune

It would have been easier if you can get other tools for free or for a cheap price, but the reality is that most other tools available in the market rely on the Yahoo API, and it can sometime cost a fortune using them for competitor research. I have been looking for tools to help me with backlink data, and most tools I have came across will be costing me thousands of dollars every year. Whereas, Yahoo Site Explorer used to be available for free.

Most Plugins and Software Already Use the Yahoo API

The final problem is that most SEO plugins I install on my browser use the Yahoo API, and the same thing goes for SEO software on my computer. I use these plugins and software for various activities every day, and to get them to work well I will need to upgrade them. The reality is that some of these plugins and software won’t release upgrades till the next few weeks, and that can really affect how my business works before then.

John is sad to see Yahoo shut down its Site Explorer, and he has special Yahoo web hosting discount for anybody interested. He specializes in reviewing various products on his blog and giving people coupons and discount offers for products like Yahoo web hosting and midphase. He has the latest midphase discount on his blog today.

There’s no service that provides 100% accuracy unless you have found the perfect world which I doubt. In the analytics world you will always find differences between services. An example of this is Google Analytics versus StatCounter. Both companies provide web analytics, but the data is different for both when looking at Unique Visitors, Pageviews, etc. They are very close which is surprising because some services are so far apart you don’t know which one to believe.

Google Analytics Data (February 23, 2011)

• 2,433 Visits
• 2,894 Pageviews

StatCounter Data (February 23, 2011)

• 2,458 Visits
• 3,017 Page Loads

Google and StatCounter are very close when reporting data, but I found a huge disparity on two services that check Markup Validation.

W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) and Nibbler (http://nibbler.silktide.com/) both provide validation which checks the markup of HTML and XHTML of Web Documents for errors.

The difference in errors reported is astonishing. I know and trust W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) who develop Web standards, led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe. How can you not trust them, the man who invented the web and not Al Gore is part of this organization.

I ran the markup validation on both sites and here’s what was reported;

W3C

Result: 4 Errors
Address: http://www.techjaws.com
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: XHTML 1.0 Transitional
Root Element: html
Root Namespace: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml

Nibbler

W3C compliance

• A total of 83 errors and 0 warnings were found on the 5 pages tested.
• No pages are W3C compliant. Because there are errors in the code, some web browsers may not be able to read this website correctly and it may not always display correctly.
• This website was validated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional

W3C reported 4 errors versus 83 errors reported by nibbler. I know that Nibbler is still in alpha and they may stay that way until their validation tool is a bit more accurate. Nibbler also reports on many other analytics and I found more inconsistencies here as well.

Nibbler misses the mark on many of its reporting metrics including;

Social media (techjaws.com)

We found 0 Tweets about this website on Twitter.
The number of tweets in the last 4 days is 30!

There are 0 articles on Digg relating to this website.
The actual number of Diggs is over 1200!

Incoming links

About 12,261 other pages were found linking to this website.
The actual number of incoming links is 16.971.

The overall score 3 days ago was 6.7 and today 5.0. How can an overall score change that much? I guess we will have to wait for beta to see if nibbler improves in accuracy.

There are few web sites that offer a free sitemap generator, but are limited to only 500 pages. I found this awesome program GSiteCrawler that has no limitations. I recently built a site map that had more than 20K pages for a friend. The process did take a long time to crawl the entire web site, but it captured every page.

The GSiteCrawler is available for free and runs under Windows. GSiteCrawler doesn’t support Windows 7.

Full installation

• Full installation

GSiteCrawler Features

Capture URLs for your site using

• a normal website crawl – emulating a Googlebot, looking for all links and pages within your website
• an import of an existing Google Sitemap file
• an import of a server log file
• an import of any text file with URLs in it

The Crawler

• does a text-based crawl of each page, even finding URLs in JavaScript
• respects your robots.txt file
• respects robots meta tags for index / follow
• can run up to 15 times in parallel
• can be throttled with a user defined wait-time between URLs
• can be controlled with filters, bans, automatic URL modifications

More features listed here.

GSiteCrawler has a built-in FTP-client that automatically uploads your new Google Sitemap files each time you update your site.

Once you create your site map and have uploaded it to your web site via FTP, you will need to add it to Google. You can learn more about how to add a sitemap to Google by visiting http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Google-Sitemap.

Make sure you haven’t linked to any admin or password protected pages in your site. If you have, they will be included in the sitemap, so make sure you get rid of them first.

There are few decent backlink tools, but none of them are very accurate, even the Google operator (link:site.com). Google is making an attempt to improve back link analysis with an update to their Links to your site feature in Webmaster Tools on October 13. This update is a major improvement over its previous versions. I am sure Google will continue to tweak “Links to your site” in Webmaster Tools for better accuracy.

Google Blog

The “Links to your site” feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you’ll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site.

There’s a problem with non-www version and the www version. The non-www version is listed as linking to the www as if it were another site, and it is listed as if thousands of links are pointing to various URLs on the www version of the site.

I would love to see Google list Pagerank data of specific backlinks, and the ability to filter/sort based on Pagerank.

Read more about the “Links to your site” feature.

Related Articles
Google Webmaster Tools Adds New Features to Search Queries
Google Search Just Got Better with Instant
Why Google Pagerank is Still Important

Website Grader is one of the best grading tools online. Website Grader provides a detailed report of all facets relating to how well your website is performing when it comes to popularity and SEO. The report will provide you actionable steps to improve your overall score.

SEO Browser is a great tool that shows you exactly how a search engine sees your site. SEO-Browser has two modes, simple and advanced.

Simple mode is an easy way to look at a website without all the formatting and graphics – just the text.  A person can quickly navigate through the pages of a website to see how the text shows up.

But there is more to SEO-Browser than simple mode.

Advanced mode shows specific details on how a page is constructed. In addition, the menu items link to various tools that are valuable for website developers and SEO consultants.

Quarkbase is another online tool that acts like a website detective. Quarkbase serves up valuable information about a website such as people, traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more. Get the 411 on any site, even your competitors!

Google Analytics is a free service provided by the God of the internet, Google. Track unique visitors, Referral Traffic, Search Traffic, Trends and so much more. You can even save your reports and send them via email. There’s no better free web analytics tool online. You will need to create an account or if you already have a Gmail account, you are good to go.

Majestic SEO – here’s another program to help you get a leg up on the competition. It gives you detailed reports about other sites’ backlinks and anchor text, giving you the anatomy of your competitors.

If you know of other great SEO Tools, please share them with us.

It has been almost 3 months since the last Google toolbar update (April 3, 2010) and it looks like there’s buzz that it has already happened on June 28. This is not the case, but more of a “glitch” or a “cache refresh” or something other than a PR update.

The next Google Pagerank update should be coming soon or in the next several days. I did notice some odd or should I say strange PR changes where some sites went from a PR4 to PR0 and back to their original Pagerank.

In my opinion – Google could be making some minor changes which are causing some Pagerank changes for some websites and inner pages. There’s some speculation that these minor updates are due to changes with backlinks, but this is only speculation.

Don’t get caught up with Google PR, because the only thing that matters is SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and not PR. If you are ranking high for keyword terms, this is where most of your traffic from Google is coming from and not PR. Don’t be mistaken, but having a lot of backlinks does provide traffic to your website every time a person clicks on your link that is posted on another website.

Google PageRank Updates 2010

Pagerank update in 2010

• 03 April 2010
• 03 June 2010 (minor update)
• 29 June 2010 (minor update)

This search engine optimization tool checks the PageRank on the mayor Google datacenters. Most times it indicates that Google is in the middle of a PageRank update when the results vary from datacenter to datacenter.

I am predicting that the next Google Toolbar update will occur between July 4 and July 7.

Listed below are SEO best practices to increase referral traffic and link building. I provided tools that will help you to achieve good results and keep you out of harms way from bad sites.

Social Engagement Building: This is an affective way to build online reputation. Select the most popular social networks like; Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon and create a profile. By doing this you can extend your network online, connect with your friends, share other websites and blogs with each other, promote your website or blog and build an online reputation. It’s important not to share the same website or blog all the time as this will make others think you’re a spammer.

In the past, many social networks would pass a vote for your website also known as a back link or incoming link. This is a popular way to increase your websites Google Toolbar Rank. Unfortunately many of these social networks now have the no-follow attribute because of the ongoing spam within these networks.

Social engagement is important as a reputation model and shouldn’t be considered as an easy way to build incoming links from external sites.

Blog Commenting: This is the most effective link building method. You can promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawlable by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs).

Directory Submission: This is still a great method to use for link building, but you need to be careful on what directories you submit to. If you submit to a directory that is red flagged by Google, you are putting your website in danger of being blacklisted. It’s important to perform manual directory submissions and never sign up with an automated directory submit bot. It’s important to choose the right category for each directory you choose to submit to. You should also submit your website or blog to the top directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, etc.

Forum Postings: This is another great way to build back links. You need to be an active member of the forum related to your blog or website. You can post/reply to a thread in other service-related forums that allow links in your signature which can be crawled by the search engines (Sign up on forums that are “Do-Follow Forums”). This is very time consuming and requires commitment.

Photo Sharing: Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. The most popular photo sharing websites are Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc.

Video Promotions: Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, etc. This is an effective way to drive traffic to your websites.

Article Submission: Write articles about our services and promotions and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help attain some deep links to your website or blog.

Search Engine Submission: Submit your website or blog to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Lycos, Excite, etc. In most cases this is not that important because Google and Yahoo will already have many of your pages indexed already.

Classifieds Submission: Submitting to classified ads is a great way to advertise your products and services. The method that works best is reverse marketing. This is when you reply to a person who is looking for your products or services. Many classified submissions are free. The most popular is Craigslist.

Answers: Participate in Answers by answering relevant questions within your niche and placing a link to your website in the source section. This is another great way to increase link popularity (Yahoo Answers).

Tools

Search Status Add-on for Firefox: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox: Just a simple extension to highlight links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status. A link that is blue is dofollow whereas a link that is pink or light red is nofollow. In order to turn this feature on go to Tools at the top of your Firefox browser and click on NoDoFollow.

Web of Trust Add-on: This add on is a great way to see if a site in your search results is safe to explore. This will help identify bad directories when you submit your website or blog to online directory services. MyWot.com provides a Firefox and IE extension. The WOT community has rated millions of websites so you can search, shop online and surf for fun without worrying. There are more than 6 million active users who have rated over 314 million sites!

How to check for all pages in Google linking to your website: To check for all incoming links, open Google and in the search box put the following;

link:yoursite.com –site:www.yoursite.com (Note: Google does not support appending further refinements onto this operator such as excluding links within the same site).

In Yahoo use: linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

Backlink Building Tools: This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

Directory service for building backlinks: A manual directory submission service. This service is free.

Directory Submission service: Another manual directory service. This service is free.

What SEO Off Page strategies do you practice?

Having broken links, server errors, or even link spam can have a negative impact to your website or blog when it comes to SEO. It could also hurt your sites reputation.

LinkAider can crawl your website or blog and check for problems fast. It takes approximately 1 hour to crawl 500 pages and there’s no limit on the amount of links it checks. You will receive a detailed report on any problems it finds. All you need to do is fix what is broken. It’s that simple!

How does it work?

1. Enter the website you want crawled
2. Define the task
3. Confirm

LinkAider will start working on your report and inform you via email when the job is done. Note: you can sign in to your account anytime to check the status of your task.

What does LinkAider Check?

Find crawling problems
LinkAider can “crawl” your site’s pages and index everything – just like Google and Yahoo web spiders. If LinkAider can’t reach your pages, you can bet that the search engines can’t either. To make sure you increase your search rankings (and get more visitors!), LinkAider can identify these crawling errors so you can find and fix what you need before the next search engine spider visits.

Catch server failures
LinkAider’s reports can reveal serious internal server errors that are rarely detected by using a browser. Make sure you catch those page errors after a server upgrade or server configuration change. Don’t take the risk with your online business.

Know what you are linking to
Don’t link up with strangers! Use LinkAider to detect link spammers (link hosts) and make sure that someone is not spamming your message boards or comment forms systematically. LinkAider lists all of your links and makes it easy to search and find any spammers.

Find duplicate page titles
Google, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts and other search engines recommend that duplicate page titles and content be avoided. LinkAider can help you eliminate duplicates.

Find large pages or images
Visitors don’t wait while your pages load into the browser. LinkAider tracks compressed and uncompressed page sizes to help you optimize the time it takes to load the page. What are the biggest pages on your site?

Fast data filters
Analyze the data you need – fast. LinkAider uses fast and efficient technology for searching, grouping, and filtering. All of the data will be at your fingertips while you inspect your website.

What does it cost?

Free: Crawl up to 500 pages per month.
$8/mo: Crawl 1000 pages per month
$24/mo: Crawl 4000 pages per month
$59/mo: Crawl 10000 pages per month
$109/mo: Crawl 20000 pages per month

It would take you hours, or even days to check everything that LinkAider provides. You don’t need to install any software on your computer. LinkAider is available for Mac, Windows and Linux machines. You can also export your reports to CSV and use them from any spreadsheet software you like.

Website: http://linkaider.com/

Yahoo Site Explorer provides a more consistent, quantitative report, when it comes to sites linking to your website or blog. Many people tend to use Google Webmaster Tools, which only shows a fraction of inbound (backlinks) to your website. All you need to do is enter your URL in the search box and click on Explore URL.

The only problem with Yahoo Site Explorer, it doesn’t provide information about the quality of the sites linking to your site. The SEOmoz Linkscape tool retrieves information on the amount of quality links pointing to your site. In order to get this information you will need to set up an account, which is free. If you want even more details, you would need to upgrade to PRO.

SEOmoz tool crawls the web every 4 to 6 weeks.

In summary, use the Yahoo Site Explorer for link popularity and SEOmoz tool for information on the quality of links pointing to your site.

It’s very important for webmasters to keep tabs on their website analytics. Does your website have a strong pulse when it comes to SEO?

Even the best tools wouldn’t help you unless you take action. It’s important to understand the data you are analyzing and make the appropriate changes to improve your websites overall SEO score.

Backlink Analyzer

An important tool when it comes to improving your Google Pagerank. Google measures your Pagerank by how many inbound links are pointing to your website. It’s not only links, but the authority of each of these links that are linking in.

Check out this Free Backlink Analyzer.

Website Grader

This tool measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors.

Check out Website Grader.

See your web page like a Google Bot

It’s important to know exactly how your website is viewed by the Google Bot. This information can help you improve your website to ensure that the Google Bot is seeing the right content and keywords.

Visit seo-browser.com. You can also try Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.

Google Search-based Keyword Tool

The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. The tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.

Check out Google Keyword Tool.

Google Analytics

This is probably the most popular webmaster tool to track visitors, referral traffic, search traffic and more. Google Analytics is a free tool and all you need to do is create an account and include the Google code before the closed body tag </body>.

Visit the Google Analytics Official Website for more information.