Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer is an indispensable free tool for exploring a site’s or individual URL’s inbound links. If you’re in the business of buying established websites, then you’ll definitely need a tool for checking inbound links.

Why are the inbound links to a website important? Because as well as carrying visitors to a website, they also help that site rank in the search engines. So if you’re buying a website, it helps to get acquainted with that site’s inbound links. They are usually the lifeblood of the site.

Checking A Site’s Inbound Links With Yahoo! Site Explorer

Type the URL you want to investigate into Yahoo! Site Explorer and then press Enter (or click Explore URL). If you are just starting to investigate a site, you should type in the URL of the homepage, e.g. http://www.mysterydomain.com. This first list shows us all the pages that currently exist on the site. We’re interested in the inbound links to the site, so click on Inlinks.

The list that is presented includes all links to the URL you typed in. If you know a little about SEO (search engine optimisation), you’ll know that links from external sites help you in the search engines much more than the internal links on your own site. Also, internal links won’t bring new visitors to your site.

In order to exclude internal links from the list so that we can focus on those all important external links, change the Show Inlinks selection to Except from this domain.

Now the list contains only those inbound links from external sites.

However, these links lead only to the homepage. What about links to the internal pages of the site? They are very useful too, so let’s have a look at those by changing the to selection to Entire Site.

This is the list of links we want: external links to all pages on the site. Note that this is only a list of links. At this point, the only assessment we can make is by looking at the number of links and to say “more is better”. This is stage 1 of inbound link analysis. Stage 2 involves actually evaluating the links themselves.

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