Examining Your Backlinks with Yahoo! Site Explorer

How does Yahoo! see your site, and who’s linking to you?

When your site has something valuable to offer, people tend to link to it. And when people are linking to a site naturally, it gives a signal to search engines that people find the site (or page) valuable.

Have you ever wondered who’s linking to you? With the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool, you can view the links that the Yahoo! Search engine is seeing point to your site, plus more information that Yahoo! has about your site, if you’re site is verified in the Yahoo! system.

Check your backlinks
Here’s where this gets fun. Let’s look at what you can do when you’re logged into Yahoo! and have verified sites, and what you can do if you’re not logged in.

1) If you’re not logged in or have no sites verified:

Go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and type in the URL for your site of choice. We’ll use HuffingtonPost.com as an example:

Huffingtonpost.com has 14,599,009 pages indexed in Yahoo’s search engine. The pages are listed below the Result details buttons. There are also 299,732 inlinks (this information changes often, so don’t be alarmed if you’re trying this and seeing different numbers).

Click the inlinks button to see some options for dissecting the inlinks. To the right of “Show Inlinks” you’ll see drop-downs showing that the current results are inlinks from all pages to the exact URL you entered, and you’ll see the pages that link to the URL listed below it.

Click on the drop-down that says “Only this URL,” and change that to “Entire Site.” You’ll see that the number of inlinks changes (in this case, there are more than 20 million inlinks to the entire HuffingtonPost.com site), and the results will likely change.

The third link in the screenshot above is HuffingtonPost.com linking to HuffingtonPost.com. To see who is linking to the site from other domains, click the drop-down next to Show Inlinks that says “From All Pages,” and change that to “Except from This Domain.”

The number of inlinks will likely change (unless there are no inlinks found from your site to the URL), and the results will show only pages that are not from this domain. In this case, HuffingtonPost.com has more than 14 million links from other domains. That’s impressive!

You’ll also notice there is an Explore button next to each of the results we’ve been seeing.

Clicking on that button allows you to view Site Explorer data for that URL. If you’re logged into Yahoo!, you may see something different, so let’s look at the extra options you get by being logged in and verified next.

2) If you’re logged in and have sites verified:

Being logged into the Yahoo! network means that you’ve logged in when you visited Yahoo! Mail or any other sites on the network. You can tell if you’re logged in by looking at the top-right area of the page. If you see “Welcome Guest,” you’ll need to sign in. If you see “Welcome (your name),” you’re already signed in.

If you have one or more sites, you can verify them with Yahoo!, so that Yahoo can give you exclusive data about your site. When you visit Yahoo! Site Explorer, you’ll see a link for My Sites on the left. From there you can add your site(s). Once you add a site, you’ll need to take a simple step to verify it, which is explained when you add the site.

In the Status column in the screenshot below, you can see that one of my sites is verified and one is not. Note that you can only verify sites you own.

Click on the Explore button to the right of your site listing to see the same type of Site Explorer screens we were looking at in the non-logged in interface. This time you’ll see some extra options.

Next to each URL, you’ll see two buttons: Details and Delete URL.

Click on Details to see more information about that URL, like the number of links, page title, key terms, Delicious bookmarks and tags, and any SearchMonkey feeds related to this page.

Now look to the left at the Site Explorer menu. You’ll see your site listed with the menu items listed underneath. If you don’t see those menu items, go back to the My Sites dashboard and click on the URL of your site listed.

You can browse around in here to discover more data about how Yahoo is able to see your site.

Compare your competitors’ backlinks
Feel free to enter any URLs into the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool. You can only get the detailed crawl data on sites that you own, but backlink data is available for any sites in Yahoo’s index. Compare the number of pages that you have indexed with your competitors, dig through the indexed pages to see what kind of content your competitors are providing, or check out how many inlinks your competitors’ sites and pages are getting, especially from domains other than your own.

You can also wear your inlink badge proudly on your website, check out other cool Site Explorer features like the Site Explorer API, and follow the Yahoo! Search blog for any updates to the Site Explorer tool and the Yahoo Search Engine.

Have fun site exploring!

— Laura Lippay

Visit Laura at Lip Service, and see some of her previous posts, “Defining Your Target Audience for SEO” and “Today’s Most Important Ranking Factor You Should Know.”