Tuesday 27 October 2009

Yahoo Site Explorer - 'Domain' Changes

Yahoo has always been great for counting the real amount of back-links that point to your website or blog.

It was easy, you simply went to Yahoo search and typed in:

domain:www.YOURWEBSITE.com

But, this has all changed in the last few weeks. No longer is it as easy to ascertain the amount of these useful links. Yes Google has a facility for counting back-links in their Webmaster Tools, but I feel this is a Google selection.

When you are link-building, you need a benchmark to give you a true appraisal of your success and this is where Yahoo stepped in.

But help is at hand, I have a found an URL which does just this job. If you type the following into your address bar:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=YOURWEBSITE.COM&bwm=i&bwmo=&bwmf=s

Of course replacing the YOURWEBSITE.COM with your own URL.

This link gives you exactly the same results that the previous 'domain' prefix gave.

So get stuck into your link-building and monitor the real results again.

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Verisfied & Not Verified in Google Webmaster Tools

Since Google changed its Webmaster Tools interface and all its internal workings I haven't been able to change my preferred domain settings.

That's till today, when I eventually got around to solving the conundrum.

You see previously in Webmaster Tools, once you'd verified your site, that was it, you could go into your settings and chose the domain you prefer: i.e. with the 'www' or without - it's all to do with canonicalisation; meaning you only want Google to index one of your domains and the usual choice is with the 'www'.

Not so of late, because once you chose a different domain preference Webmaster Tools informs you that you first need to verify your site...

Fortunately I've found a solution. To change to your preferred domain within the settings interface, all you need to do is add both of your domains to Webmaster Tools, i.e.:

mywebsite.com
&
www.mywebsite.com

That's it problem solved, go back to settings and make your choice.