Duane Forrester from Bing announced they are shutting down the Link Explorer tool that they launched in June 2012.
Link Explorer is a Bing powered competitive link analysis tool that won over the SEO community. Bing built it in response to them taking over Yahoo Search and killing off Yahoo Site Explorer in November 2011. Bing picked up that the SEO community loved the Yahoo tool to look up competitors links and decided to rebuild it under Bing Webmaster Tools.
Three years later, Bing has decided it is too much to keep going. It seems like the search team at Bing is taking the functionality away from the Webmaster Tools team at Bing. Duane said:
As the size of the Bing index has grown many times over since 2012, and as the architecture of our index has evolved to improve speed and efficiency, we no longer will have access to this information at query time going forward.
Duane added that this isn't a big deal because SEOs didn't understand Link Explorer. He said, "Link Explorer was often misunderstood in that people were looking for the inbound links pointing to their own site in Link Explorer. However, Link Explorer offered only a small sample of these links." Maybe it was misunderstood because Bing didn't maintain the tool?
He added, "the real power tool to get the most comprehensive data about links pointing to your own site remains the Inbound Links tool accessible from the Reports & Data Section. It offers viewing and export of up to a million inbound links at once, shows up to 20,000 inbound links per page and includes not only the link source but also the anchor text of the inbound link."
Well, why didn't you make that level of detail available in Link Explorer?
It is sad to see the beloved Yahoo Site Explorer tool go away but no one should be surprised. Bing Webmaster Tools has not done much innovation recently and webmasters do not spend much of their time in that tool.
So now SEOs need to use third-party tools such as Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer and many others.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
