As Yahoo already prepared us in July, the company has announced yesterday that it is officially shutting down one of the favorites, useful and productive marketing tools online, Yahoo Site Explorer, in November 21st.

In a very short blog post, Yahoo has explained that after the full transition of the Yahoo’s search engine to Bing, the users should now use Bing Webmaster Tools as it presents combined data from Bing and Yahoo, while from November 21st the Yahoo Site Explorer won’t be available anymore.

Even though the writing was on the wall even before July and even though Yahoo neglect a little the Site Explorer over the past year, there is something very sad about that- It is one of the oldest SEO tools that served so many marketers and webmasters over the years and it is now going away for good.

Successors?

As for its alleged successor, Bing Webmaster Tools- There is no doubt that it is a very good tool to see your site from the search engine eyes and to identify crawling/indexing issues. The problem is, it doesn’t provide thorough backlinks information as the Yahoo Site Explorer and actually, from November 21st there won’t be any search engine tool which provide this kind of information.

There are other good marketing tools to receive backlinks data stats like the Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz or Majestic SEO, however, There aren’t powered by a search engine and therefore won’t offer the best clear picture.

Goodbye Yahoo Site Explorer, thank you for serving so many work at home folks and offered us great accurate (more or less) data, you will surely be missed!