Today has been one strange working experience.

If you are like me and have Seoquake plugin or equivalent installed on your browser of choice you may have noticed that the number of backlinks that show up in the toolbar that come back from Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) now read zero (see pic above).

It has been common knowledge that Yahoo Site Explorer was going to be phased out this year and it has definitely gone a bit flaky over the last few months.

But as of yesterday the doors finally closed on this free tool that has been used extensively by marketers, domainers and persons working in SEO.

Not only will a take a bit of time to get used to not having backlink info on every site I visit ready for a bit of quick analysis, it has also effected some of the desktop software that I use on a daily basis.

I have just checked SEO Spyglass (free version) and the results for one of my own UK authority domains is only showing 14 links from the Blekko search engine, gone are the 400 links that were being displayed there this morning courtesy of Yahoo Site Explorer.

I quick gander over at Spyglass Blog and they report that their software will continue to gather links without YSE and that the software will work as normal.

Well the jury’s still out on that one and we will have to wait and see if they can pull data from other sources as they claim, without losing the effectiveness of what has been a super bit of free kit for me over the past 4 or 5 years.

It also appears that Scrapebox and Market Samurai have also lost some of there functionality as of today.
So they and others that used the YSE API will find themselves batting on a sticky wicket until they can get round this problem.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of free alternatives in the market as we speak.
The services that can be found online all seem to offer some sort of limited access to their backlinking data, but if you want to delve deeper then you will have to pay.

ahrefs $49 / month for the Basic Beginners Package
Open Site Explorer $99 / Month for the 5 site package
Majesticseo £29.99 / Month Silver package

Today I have had a look around and used the free services of the companies just mentioned and they all left me wanting more. All they offer is a taster of their data which is of little use for my purposes.
I will have to sign up and research there offerings further.

I will of course report back on my findings.

If anybody knows of a decent Yahoo Site Explorer alternative then please leave a comment.

I have decided to give it a bit of an update and have got rid of the dreary black look shown in the pic on the left.

I am also in the process of a adding some new strategies to my IM arsenal and I will be blogging about them quite extensively in the very near future.

This is how my post excerpts were being formatted

The LG 47SL9000 is one of the most technologically advanced HD TVs available on the market at the moment.
It offers a near-perfect marriage of form and function and if you can afford the premium that you will pay for the cutting edge technology then this LG LED TV should be a real consideration.
Slimline Panel for [...]

This seems to be the default option in the Studiopress WordPress themes that I have been using so I popped along to the Studiopress help forum to see if any help was at hand.
As usual there was plenty but getting down to the nitty gritty would take a bit of research.

To start off with it seems that there is quick tag called more on the visual editor that I had never noticed before. A bit of a peruse over at WordPress Codex Customising the Read More and I was instantly enlightened.
But a bit more help was needed to get this properly implemented into my blogs.
I bit more searching over at Studiopress and I was ready to have go at editing my WordPress files.
This is what I did for the Studiopress Church Theme. I am pretty sure that it will work with the other themes.

Firstly open up the archive.php and look for this bit of code:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

and replace with

<?php the_content_limit(500, “”); ?>

This has the effect of making the post excerpts 500 characters long and it loses the [...] from the end of the post.

Now to finish the job off I had to go to all my posts and insert the <!–more–> tag at the point where I wanted the excerpt to finish. This is easy to do using the more button in the HTML visual editor on the edit post page.

This is how the excerpt now looks complete with the Read More linking to the post page.

The LG 47SL9000 is one of the most technologically advanced HD TVs available on the market at the moment. It offers a near-perfect marriage of form and function and if you can afford the premium that you will pay for the cutting edge technology then this LG LED TV should be a real consideration. Slimline Panel for Easy Wall Mounting Read More →

Note:
Don’t forget to insert the <!–more–> tag in a post at a place before 500 characters. If you want longer excerpts just change the number to something higher in <?php the_content_limit(500, ""); ?>


Lovely I thought, lets go and see what this blog has to say about my site/post.

Shock Horror. The cheeky sod had not only stolen my image but reproduced the post word for word.

Now I know that this happens all the time and was not that bothered as when this type of content stealing has happened to me before and the type of sites that have nicked my content have never really benefited from it as Google will only see it as duplicate content.
Also having asked for it to be removed has usually fell on deaf ears.

But then I looked a bit closer at the image on the infringing blog and noticed that the blogger was actually serving the image from my own WordPress upload folder.

This started me thinking about bandwith issues, so I did a quick search on G and it appears that this method of serving images is called Image Hotlinking.

So this guy is not only stealing my content but also my bandwith.

Then I thought about any SEO benefits for my site that this hotlinking of images may bring about.

After a bit more research it seems that the consensus of opinion is that:

• Google may up your SERPs for that particular image in their Image Search Results

• Google may see that other people like what you have on your site and pass some authority to the domain

So my take on this is if you are not having a bandwith issue then let the images ride.
Who knows you may be getting a bit of juice from the sites hotlinking to your images.

But in the end I was still a bit incensed with this particular blogger stealing my copy for his own benefits.
He is in direct competition with my blog review site and I felt he needed a polite warning.

So I renamed the image, reloaded the post and changed the original.

His post now looks like this:

Update28.06.2011
The pic is still there.

As you can see from the image above the icons that allow you to edit the post are not there.
Also the post has been written with HTML tags in place which shouldn’t be there.

The last time this happened on a blog of mine was when I reinstalled WordPress straight over copy of it on my server. I then found out that I had made some fundamental mistakes in my execution of this procedure that resulted in all manor of messed up files.

This time round it is a new clean install of WP on a new domain so I decided if I could get to the bottom of the problem and find out exactly what file of folder was either missing or corrupt.

It seems that the folder that was never fully downloaded to the server was the wp-includes/js folder. I ftp’d the js folder and the now everything seems ok.

Well we will just have to wait and see.

It looks the first post under the WordPress Cat will be about resolving the issue I have with the Visual Editor not displaying in the Edit Post page.