Yahoo has been implementing some very major changes on its search architecture starting this week — Yahoo search in North America is now powered by Bing. This is in part of Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance 10 year deal which was closed last July 29, 2009 to take on search giant Google.

Yahoo Linkdomain query not working

I havent heard any news lately about Yahoo and Bing partnership, until one of my search queries which I mainly depended on for gathering prospect edu/gov links were not working in Yahoo! Search US just of today.

1. linkdomain:competingsite.com +site:.edu -site:.com -site:competingsite.com
2. linkdomain:competingsite.com +site:.gov -site:.com -site:competingsite.com

If you enter the above queries in http://search.yahoo.com and http://ca.search.yahoo.com, no results will be found. Take notice of the “Powered By Bing” text on the footer section for each result page.

Yahoo! — Powered by Bing

After some quick research for some explanation, here’s what I found out in Yahoo Search Blog:

Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both Web and mobile searches. Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft

Voila! So this is why my top gun edu & gov link finder is not working in Yahoo! Search. Bing apparently does not support the Yahoo! linkdomain query in which most of the SEO tools are dependent upon such as Firefox plugin SEOQuake and keyword research tool Market Samurai among few others.

Linkdomain Command Alternatives

Well, for the time-being, only Yahoo! US and Canada searches are powered by Bing. This means, that you can still use the old Yahoo! search commands in other Yahoo TLD’s such as UK, India, Philippines and etc. We expect Bing to move on other countries sooner, but though this is temporary, it is the best alternative.

Another linkdomain replacement would be Yahoo Siteexplorer, export link data, then filter for edu/gov pages. Downside for this is that the exported data is only be limited to 1,000 links, in which, compared to linkdomain command, is the overall number of crawled backlinks.

Google and Bing Webmaster Tools also report a more comprehensive link data compared to what is shown in link query search results. But it requires site owner authentication which becomes useless if you are conducting a link competitor analysis.

Lastly, tools such as OpenSiteExplorer and Majestic SEO would cost extra dollars for full features, but its as close as you can get if you want find quality edu/gov backlinks from your competitors.

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