Well, it’s a sad day for many of us here in the office, as we wave goodbye to Yahoo Site Explorer for one final time.

With Google’s eminence in search all but enshrined as law, it’s not often that something Yahoo does has such a profound of wide reaching affect on the SEO department here at Creare.  However when the company reminded the world just before the weekend that site explorer was retiring, there was barely a dry eye in the place!

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but the fact remains that some of us did use the service, and I think it’s a given that the tool was used widely across the web.

So why the death blow?

Well, it all comes after Yahoo announce that they have finally completed the transition of their search algorithm over to Bing. This means that certain services, like site explorer have had to be discontinued.

On their blog, the company stated that:

“Creating a migration path to Bing Webmaster tools for users of Yahoo! Site Explorer, while continuing to support Site Explorer for international users during the transition period proved challenging.”

So it seems that we’re to use Yahoo’s webmaster tools instead, which admittedly can provide a lot of the same data, although there are some things missing.

While the affect of this closure might seem limited, it’s worth noting that henceforth we’re unlikely to see a tool like site explorer again. Sure, SEOmoz and similar can provide worthy alternatives (and in fact I used the latter more anyway), but Yahoo’s was unique in that it was delivered and maintained by a search engine and therefore many felt it had a certain reliability.

Do you use the tool? Are you concerned about the negatively affect on your strategies as a result of its closure? If so, please feel free to leave a comment below, or alternatively, you might want to run all of your SEO campaigns through the explorer now, as it’s still live at the time of writing!

‘What’s the difference between exploring and being lost?’ 

- Dan Eldon, Photographer/Journalist

Forget space. In many ways the web is the final frontier. Like the universe, the web is always expanding, and for us users there’s no way of ever depleting it of its rich and many resources. Since its inception, the web has been explored and mapped by countless programs and browsers, and as SEO consultants we’re no different. Like every web surfers we are explorers, but the difference is that we spend our whole lives immersed in a living breathing jungle of websites, rather than simply indulging in the odd foray.

For link building, this poses some problems. Like the Elephants who return time and time again, generation after generation to the same water hole, we can overuse and over visit the same stale directories and link opportunities. One day we find that the link juice has all dried up.

My point is that to find fresh, new and therefore powerful link building opportunities; we have to tread different paths through the web – we have to get lost. Instead of using the same old search terms or directory lists, let’s look at some search operator combinations which could help ensure you never find your way back to the same old sites again.

We have covered basic operators before, so check that blog out first for clarification regarding how any of these combinations work when separated. I should also reference this blog, which serves as a source for this post. I’ve taken the most useful ones to reproduce here.

1. Industry Hotspots (linkfromdomain:)

a. This combination in incredibly useful if you’re coming into a campaign from the cold. Say you’ve been given a client who specialises fish pedicures. Do you know anything about fish pedicures? Probably not, so you’re going to need a way of find out which sites are hubs for that industry, so that you can become a part of them as part of your internet marketing/link building campaign.

First Google your keywords and grab the URL of an authoritative competitor or two. Then head to Bing and slap in:

linfromdomain:fishpedicures.co.uk

This will return a list of sites to which that authoritative site links, and by repeating the process with multiple competitors, you can identify common outgoing link targets and therefore likely industry authorities.

b. You can reverse this too, allowing you to see which sites your industry’s authority links to. Use linkfromdomain:industryauthority.co.uk keywords –site: industryauthority.co.uk to achieve this (swapping industryauthority.co.uk for your industry authorities URL and keywords for the topic in question. This latter method can save you trawling through page after page of site explorer link lists.

c. The final application of this operator and its combinations could be useful, although the ethics of the technique are questionable and it’s probably not advised you employ it. The aim is to find domains which are up for grabs, yet which also have high quality links headed to them. First select an authoritative site, and then, in Bing, use the following search operator combination:

linkfromdomain:authoritativesite.com domain expired

This could return sites which have link authority headed their way, but which you can buy and 301 redirect to your own site. Also, swap domain expired with domain for sale for alternative results.

2. Changing URL links to keyword rich anchor text links.

This could be an easy win for a flagging campaign. This method allows you to find links which use your URL only. In some instances, the webmaster of said site could then be approached and kindly asked that the anchor text is used instead of the URL. Just a though, obviously. In Google, use:

intext:www.myurl.co.uk –site:www.myurl.co.uk

Note that the second part of the operator filters out internal links so remove this if you want to include them.

3. Sourcing links from quality domains only.

This trick is useful if you suspect that a competitor has one or two really powerful links which you don’t have. Perhaps there’s a governmental website listing approved contractors in your industry and you’re not a part of it – this combination will tell you.

In Yahoo search, use:

linkdomain:yourcompetitor.co.uk inurl:ac.uk OR inurl:.gov.uk OR inurl:.edu

This will return results listing pages with links to your competitor, but only from sites with those domain extensions (which are likely to be high authority sites). Remember, if your competitor has managed to get a link there, so can you.

The above are just some search operators which can help you navigate the web more usefully where SEO is concerned. There are quite a few more combinations out there and it may be worth covering the rest in a future blog, but for now please feel free to add your own in the comments below.

Facebook recently announced a few updates for their Platform: updated live stream plugin, liked articles appearing in search results, improvements to real-time updates, staying informed.

‘Staying informed’ isn’t that interesting, that’s them just trying to get people to read their blog.

The one that should be of interest to the SEO industry is the ‘Liked articles appearing in search results’. And this is the reason why “if your friend clicks “Like” on an article at a news site, the article will appear in your News Feed and can now also surface in the search type ahead.” that is from Namita Gupta, a product manager for Facebook Platform.
Now I’m no tech geek so I’m going to skip the Open Graph stuff.

Crummy over at WPN brought up a few points with regard to the implications of this new feature.

He mentions the size of Facebook’s audience, the ease for content to go viral, and how easy it to achieve a ‘like’ over a ‘link’. Though a problem they may face is that people don’t tend to think of Facebook as a place to search for content and this feature will only show to your friends so if your friends don’t know or care about ‘liking’ things you won’t be seeing any articles.

We’ve talked about Google having rivals in Bing and Yahoo but it always felt like they were outsiders, long shots who, if everything went right, could challenge Google. We’ve mentioned Facebook’s challenger credentials before but this seems to be something solid that may not (will not) knock Google off the top spot but it’s a large step in the right direction.

If searching for content catches on in Facebook then there will be a dramatic and sudden shift in the focus of SEO, potentially with a stronger focus on original/enthralling/interesting content.

But, before we all start running for the thesaurus, will this affect the carpet shops, the plumbers, the aerial installers? Are people going to be ‘liking’ aerial installation articles or searching for them on Facebook? Facebook is more of a hangout, a social club, whereas Google has a more business feel, though you can find pretty much anything on Google, it’s replaced the Yellow Pages, paper based advertising, it’s a modern form of advertising for businesses.

Let’s say Facebook SEO takes off and becomes incredibly popular, Google will still be the daddy, small and medium businesses need Google not Facebook.

On Tuesday WebProNews reported that Facebook had been granted a search based patent. Although they applied for the patent back in 2004, good planning probably.

Facebook is no longer, and hasn’t been for a while, a place for university students to chat and share photos, it’s become a society. A mini culture that, not only groups of friends join but businesses and brands. If it continues to constantly attract companies to its Pages section then Facebook will have a lot of search authority.

We’ve been talking about Facebook and its SEO potential quite a bit over the last few months and I don’t know if I’m in the minority but I am not a massive fan of Facebook. I find it annoying, frustrating and not that intuitive. I don’t think by becoming a search engine it would improve or make me want to use it more.

I think the people that use Google, Yahoo and Bing are of a broader demographic than the people that use Facebook. If a receptionist needs to book a hotel for their boss in a Birmingham are they going to log into Facebook and have a look through there or are they more likely to do a quick search in Google/Yahoo/Bing? The search engine of course, this is a fact*.

So although I think Facebook would have potential as a search engine I don’t think it could ever steal Google’s crown. It could steal the younger internet users who are attached to their accounts but never take the SEO kingdom.

*Hypothetical fact

Over at WebProNews the ever delightful Chris Crum has an article reporting July’s search market statistics (for the good ‘ol US of A).

No surprise; Google is still top dog, Bing is making waves and Yahoo has been losing ground over the last year (a nice selection of metaphors).

One interesting stat The Crumster picked out was that searches in America are down from 10.5 billion to 8.8 billion.

This stat is probably linked to the rise and rise of smartphones and the popularity of apps.

I wonder if the recession has made any difference, people will have less disposable cash therefore being reluctant to buy/do things, though surely people use the internet to look for deals…hmmm. Sorry, wasn’t very conclusive there was I?

Google’s been expanding as a brand, Bing’s been trying hard to increase market share, there haven’t been any acts of debauchery linked to any of the major search engines (though there was that whole Google Street View thing); after that high level of analysis I guess that leaves us with smartphones and apps.

I think the Nielsen figures may be a bit flawed. People with smartphones have them by their side all day, they have the internet with them all day. If they have a question, if they want to find out something important (like; Dany N’Guessan goals) they can do that within about 10 secs. So surely these users will make use of search engines, what else will they be using their smartphones for? Making phone calls? No.

If searches had been in decline for the past year I don’t think SEO would be doing as well as it is.

Does this information bring up another point, will there come a time where someone develops a search engine especially for smartphones? At the moment there are sites which have mobile versions, in the future, will we have  Google SERPs that take smartphones screen size, chubby fingers and the fact you’re probably making the search in a bar, trying to prove a friend wrong, into account?