The search engine optimisation community was expecting this bad news: Yahoo Site Explorer, maybe the most popular service for analysing backlinks of certain websites, it is to be closed somewhen this year. Offered for free for so many years, this online SEO tool was considered a great help when trying to create a “links profile picture” for competitors’ websites or when checking our own website’s backlinks.

Lately, many SEOs reported that Yahoo Site Explorer is updating its database way slower than before and this near closing-down seems to be the answer. After almost 6 years of being used by thousands of SEOs, Hemant Minocha (Product Manager for Yahoo Site Explorer) announced that later this year this popular product is to be discontinued.

Furthermore, you can read on Yahoo Search Blog the recommendations for anyone that was using YSE to sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use it accordingly. Problem with the Bing’s Tools is that it is almost a certain thing they will not reveal so many linking details on websites; however, only time will tell us how Microsoft’s Bing will improve and IF it will be improved (in terms of linking “exploration”).

You can still benefit from YSE for a couple of months and for now, the most “appropriate” SEO tools for analysing backlinks for a certain website seems to be those provided by Majestic SEO. Of course, this coming with a monthly fee which is quite high when talking about more than average linking data.

There are many ways in which you can increase the numbers of backlinks pointing to a certain website and in the same time drive direct traffic through to those links, but one of the most interesting strategies remains to be the Q&A websites. There are many quality ones available, among them the popular ones Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers and AOL Answers, these should be part of your “portfolio”.

But why do Q&A websites work? It seems that recently, more and more people ask this question on search engines instead of searching for the exact keyword. Example: instead of searching for “web design” more and more people are searching for phrases like “can you recommend me a cheap web design company?” You get the idea.

Two other major reasons why Q&A sites should be used in your Internet marketing strategies are:

1.      They have a massive amount of traffic

2.      They rank quite great in the search engines

Q&A sites are definitely a must for building backlinks and for building authority, but how to properly do this? Two great tips here:

1.      Think as your potential customer thinks

Think about what kind of questions a potential customer would ask. Try to find as many relevant questions as you might come up with, search for them in Google and start replying to those Q&A websites coming high in the SERPs.

2.      Q&A aggregators

There are many aggregators available like QuestionHub, use them to find relevant questions to your industry and become an authority in your niche.

A Lot of buzz lately in the online environment regarding Yahoo and some of its services that are about to be closed. It all started with a picture posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier in which some of Yahoo’s services seem to be on the edge of getting shut-down.

Del.icio.us is not the only service that is up to be closed, according to the leaked picture on the list there are other well-known services like MyBlogLog, AltaVista, Fire Eagle, Yahoo Buzz and the Traffic APIs.

The picture is part of an internal slideshow that was given to Yahoo employees and it’s made of three parts : the Sunset, the Merge and the Make Feature. The former employee’s picture was strengthened by other Yahoo employees that confirmed the image on Twitter, however they seem to be close to being fired, according to Yahoo Chief Product Officer Irving Blake’s tweet : “ Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone! ”.

The picture says it all: on the sunset services we can see services like Yahoo Buzz (supposed to be a Digg challenger when it was launched), search engines Alta Vista and AllTheWeb (from Overture), social networking service MyBlogLog (overwhelmed by Facebook Connect) and Del.icio.us (a popular social bookmarking service).

However, whether these will be closed or sold is not certitude yet but it seems Yahoo is preparing to change things in its portfolio. On the last run, Liza Gannes from AllThingsD reported that the products featured in “sunset” are to be closed and not to be sold.

WebCreationUK is keeping an eye on this news and will certainly update this when official papers are to be launched.