On November 21st, 2011 Yahoo officially ended its Site Explorer program. This tool was first launched in 2005 by Tim Mayer and allowed users to verify their website with Yahoo. Yahoo has announced that Bing’s Webmaster Tools have replaced Site Explorer. This comes as no surprise, Yahoo had warned us about the upcoming change in August.
In an August 2010 blog post, we said we would continue Site Explorer with a focus on new features for webmaster community, even after the transition to Microsoft platforms is complete. We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value. Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.
Yahoo announced the shutdown of the site explorer program on their website with the following message:
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.
What does this mean?
Moving forward the Bing Webmaster Tools will fully replace the Yahoo Site Explorer. Those sites that were verified using the Yahoo Site Explorer will still be indexed into the Bing search algorithm. We recommended that these sites now verify
using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that any new pages added to their site will be properly indexed into the Bing algorithm.
The merging of Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools completes the merger of Bing and Yahoo into two search engines working off the same platform. In the latest numbers from October 2011 Google had the largest percentage of the market with 65.6% of searches, Yahoo is next with 15.2% and Bing closely behind with 14.7%. Since Yahoo and Bing are working off the same platform, the Bing algorithm now provides 29.9% of all search results.
– Matt Wilkos
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