Is this site legit? Use the Trackback for the Web.
| Monday, April 17th, 2006 | --amit |
One Yahoo! cool tool I love is "Site Explorer". It's like Trackback for the Web: you can easily 'trackback' links coming into a page, links into those pages, and so on, very simply. If you own any sites, this is a great way to figure out who's giving you some link love.
But you can sometimes use Site Explorer to verify the authenticity of a site. For example, someone once forwarded me a link to http://www.annualcreditreport.com. It does sound like a spam/fake site, does it not? However, if you look at the Site Explorer inlinks to this page, the #2 result is http://www.ftc.gov. So the site's likely legit.
Of course, you can't take this at face value - for example, if there was a public message board on ftc.gov and there was a link from that board entry, sure, that doesn't mean much, so you have to be a little careful. (OTOH, while writing this post, I mistakenly tried to find the ftc.gov link to http://freecreditreport.com (by mistake), to no avail - so the idea works!)
There are some filters to show inlinks only from external domains etc, but that's just gravy.
Update
Yes, I admit it - I got carried away with the excitement, and whipped up a 'Site Explorer Badge'. You can put this on your blog/site sidebar, and it'll tell you how many people are talking about your blog/site (ie linking to it)! Clicking the link will take you to the Site Explorer inlink page for your site. What does it look like? It looks like this: 
, but it'll usually reside in your blog/site sidebar, eg on this blog itself.
How do you put this on your site? Simply cut-and-paste the code from this link. It's a simple CSS badge, and uses the JSON Yahoo! Search APIs. Make sure you change the application ID in the code (search for the string 'ytrackback') to your own. Creating an application ID is simple: just click here.
Update 2:
I'd like to plead the newbie amendment! I realized that there are two fine Yahoo!s that I'm guilty of not giving credit (and link love!) to, so here you go:
Micah Dubinko for introducing me to the whole http://annualcreditreport.com business. He even blogged about the exact thing in Jan!
Jason Levitt for writing the fine tutorial on the Dynamic SCRIPT tag I use for the hack.
April 17th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
I’m glad you guys opened this place . I just can’t wait to read your entries. Have fun :)
April 17th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day…
Do you want to know everything that’s cool about Yahoo! ?? Do you want to be regularly updated on tips and tricks ?
Now we’ve got a more or less official website called Y! Cool thing of the Day. The blog is managed by some Yahoos. The guys…
April 19th, 2006 at 6:23 am
Oooh. An egosurfing tool!
Thanks, it’s cool.
April 19th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
It’s all about the ego-surfing. Well, unless it’s delving for information about someone else.
April 28th, 2006 at 1:32 am
The trackback hack is cooooool.
June 8th, 2006 at 9:48 am
The link to the trackback code leads to a 404.
June 8th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Whoops. Fixed now!
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:30 pm
[...] Webzari seems to be a product of Yahoo! Korea, built on top of Site Explorer (see previous blog post about Site Explorer). If you type a URL into the search box at the top of the page, you get a results page complete with planets and spaceships and comets and all sorts of other things highly relevant to site exploration. You’re shown fifteen planets at once, each correspond to a particular Site Explorer result. There are 30 text results shown further down on the page, hence the 1-15/16-30 navigation in the upper right of the Flash view (you can advance to the next page using the arrows). All of the planet sizes are relative to the corresponding site’s rank (which is why you get a zoom-in effect when you click to the 16-30 tab). If you click on a planet, it gives you a more detailed description of the site and also constructs a small house. I believe that the color of the planets identifies the country from which the site is hosted, also indicated by the flag that the spaceship displays as you mouse over. [...]
October 9th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
[...] Site Explorer Trackback button - Hey, that site looks familiar… [...]
July 13th, 2007 at 10:36 am
I am new here and I just wanna say that it’s so cool for you guys to open up a blog like this to talk about new stuffs from Yahoo. Looking forward to visit here everyday!