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October 05, 2006

Site Explorer Authentication – Some Improvements and Notes

We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.

  • Many of you have noted that the authentication filename is too long. We are changing the prefix we use so that the full filename is much shorter, 27 characters only, within the limits for filenames that we came across.
  • For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.
  • Note that these changes are backward compatible, so if you have the old authentication file name, you don’t need to change or re-authenticate. We will look for both key files.

A few other tips we wanted to share regarding authentication:

  • Do not remove the authentication key after the first site authentication. We periodically check for the presence of the key and your site will be unauthenticated if we can’t find the file.
  • Authenticate at the level at which you have control over the content. For example, if you have a site on geocities, say http://www.geocities.com/my_site, authenticate within your site directory. To do this, add your site’s root path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site – not the site root (http://www.geocities.com). So your key file would be available at the path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site/y_key_abyahooauthkeyyz.html.

We have also made other minor updates to the interface designed to make Site Explorer easier to use.

We appreciate your feedback and are doing our best to address it. One of our goals is to make Site Explorer even more easy to use. So please let us know if our tweaks help make the tool a bit more webmaster friendly and continue to share your thoughts with us!

Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar, Apostolos ‘Lakis’ Karmirantzos, Di Chang
Site Explorer Team

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Comments

  1. Priyank – Is there anything planned for sites like blogspot.com or yahoo360 where the site owners cannot upload anything to the root directory ?

    Can we expect to see a HTML meta tag as well for authentication ?

    Posted by: Amit Agarwal | October 5th, 2006 9:29 pm

  2. How about we are able to measure statistics of click throughs for each URL submitted in the sitemap? To see what are the top click through URLs for the site?

    Posted by: mohanarun | October 6th, 2006 4:13 am

  3. I’m with Amit here! I’ve blogged before http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/2006/08/yahoo-site-explorer-beta-no.html about the lack of ability to authenticate Blogspot blogs.

    I’m rather surprised that you don’t allow a method at least for Yahoo 360 (but then Google didn’t allow Sitemaps authentication for Blogspot when they first rolled that out, either – I guess all organisations could benefit from more joined up thinking!).

    A meta tag for authentication would definitely help lots of us. Pretty please, with sugar on top?

    Posted by: Improbulus | October 6th, 2006 5:29 am

  4. I agree about the meta tags, I was going to request that, but instead, I’ll join in with the other commenters.

    Posted by: The Waynderful Wangel | October 6th, 2006 9:49 am

  5. It’s now better to use. Much easier.

    Posted by: ed | October 6th, 2006 9:35 pm

  6. Is there a way to authenticate a Yahoo! Store?

    Posted by: bobsc | October 12th, 2006 8:10 pm

  7. One more person (me) requesting the HTML meta tag method for authentication.

    Is anyone at Yahoo listening?

    Posted by: ITautomationFreak | October 16th, 2006 12:46 pm

  8. Like many people, I have a blogger blog and am unable to upload files for authentication. How do I authenticate my site? Have you considered implementing metatag authentication like Google.

    Posted by: Mr Wave Theory | November 2nd, 2006 8:34 pm

  9. I also vote for a Meta Tag as requested by the others above(Improbulus, The Waynderful Wangel and Mr Wave Theory).

    A Google-like means of authentication via meta-tag is much more clean than cluttering your documentroot with files of random name.

    Thanks,
    GoAbroad.com

    Posted by: GoAbroad.com | November 20th, 2006 8:40 am

  10. Kindly enable meta tag authentication for Blog*Spot blogs.

    Posted by: Marhgil Macuha | December 11th, 2006 10:49 pm

  11. I would also like to ask for some some way to authenticate Blogspot blogs. This seems like it’s turning into a petition. =)
    Best, Ryan.

    Posted by: Ryan Marle | December 12th, 2006 2:57 pm

  12. Yes you need a way to authenticate blogs written on blogger and hosted on blogspot.com

    Posted by: Sally | January 10th, 2007 8:03 pm

  13. I am yet another person who asks for a method to authenticate for those who use Blogger blogs.
    Please!!!

    Posted by: Anna | January 28th, 2007 2:09 pm