A couple of weeks ago I read a post announcing that Yahoo! Site Explorer was gone. After that I started looking around for some alternatives for checking backlinks of my website for my SEO efforts, and one impressed me: Blekko.
If you don’t know the story, Blekko is a search engine which the goal of filtering spam from its results. They do that by using a list of trusted sites and then crawling the web from those sites as starting points.
Another difference is the use of slashtags, which help users to filter and customize their search queries.
It sure would take more than that to make me switch away from Google as far as searching goes, but Blekko is adding a really nice set of tools for SEOs and webmasters.
For example, if you search for a domain name followed by “/SEO” you’ll get a pretty detailed report about that site.
As for the number of backlinks listed Blekko has one of the most accurate counts I have seen in a while, so check it out.