Those who have been around on the web for a long time are almost certainly familiar with the Yahoo Site Explorer. This service, while it offered a good spread of webmaster-oriented features, was used most popularly as one of the three places each site mustsubmit a sitemap (the other two being Google Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Webmaster Central). Yahoo Site Explorer seems to have outlived its usefulness, however. It’s slated for shut down later this year, as are all associated APIs.
Why Site Explorer Is Shutting Down
Yahoo Site Explorer has become a respected service, but that in and of itself is far from enough. The fact is, after Yahoo sold their sou—search engine to Microsoft, the need for a sitemap submission and webmaster tool interface dwindled. Despite this, Yahoo initially stated they had every intent of keeping the service running. Unsurprisingly, they have since decided that the service is simply redundant, and that since Microsoft is covering much of the same territory, “Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value.”
Site Explorer likely hung on for as long as it did because it was still a mandatory tool for countries where Yahoo was still running their own organic back-end. Yahoo continues to migrate these services to Microsoft, however, and the transfer will be complete by the end of this year. At that same time, Yahoo Site Explorer will see its final sunset.
An exact date for shutdown hasn’t been released. Users who want to know when Site Explorer will actually be closed should pay attention to the YSearch Blog (linked in the sources, below) to see how the transition to Microsoft is going, and meanwhile should set up their site on Bing Webmaster Tools.
[Sources include: The YSearch Blog & Search Engine Land]
