Most SEO professionals are only really interested in Google with their SEO practises. This is done for a number of reasons, such as:
- Search engines such as Lycos are used by less people than turn up each week for a MK Dons match
- If you do right by Google, you’ll generally be doing right by other engines
- Even ranking #1 in Yahoo for your main keyword isn’t going to get you much traffic in the UK
So, we can gauge by this that even the once mighty Yahoo is fairly innocuous when it comes to bringing you traffic, so does that make Yahoo utterly useless for SEO?
No actually. You see, while Google has its Webmaster Tools, which is in pretty much every way superior to anything Yahoo offers, Webmaster Tools (and Google especially) likes to keep its cards fairly close to its chest, very close indeed when links to your site are concerned.
Yahoo Site Explorer on the other hand is a little more open about things. This is why when you’re analysing how many links your website has, how many pages you have indexed (and more importantly how many pages and links your competitors have) you can get this information by using Yahoo Site Explorer.
Using the ‘site:’ and ‘link:’ commands in Google will get you far fewer results, but just because Google doesn’t show your website as having as many links as you can see in Yahoo, it doesn’t mean Google doesn’t know about them.
As mentioned above, Google keeps its cards closer to its chest than Yahoo.
So, when trying to find out how your website compares to your competitors in terms of the number of links and pages indexed, use Yahoo. For everything else, use Google.
