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January 30, 2007

Yahoo! Site Explorer: Authenticate your site via a META tag and more goodies

We spend a lot of time listening to our users, and I am happy to say we�ve gotten better at it. We�ve been using feedback forms and message boards, and finally at the Chicago SES last December, we launched our new Site Explorer Suggestion Board. This is a new user based ranking feedback tool, which was first introduced at an internal Yahoo! Hack day and is currently being deployed across the Yahoo! network. It allows you to make suggestions for the product, vote for existing suggestions or simply comment on them.

Today, we launched a new version of Site Explorer that addresses some of the Top Rated suggestions from our users. The key features are:

� Site Authentication using META tags: For those of you who cannot upload an authentication file to your site, such as a blog, you will now be able to authenticate your site in Site Explorer by including an authentication key as part of a META tag on the home page of your site. This is in addition to the existing mechanism of putting a file on your site home directory.

� Detailed Authentication Errors: We now provide detailed errors on authentication failures, making it much easier to diagnose possible problems.

� Delete URLs: For your authenticated sites, you can now delete any URLs from the index. Simply locate the URL in Site Explorer and click on the �Delete URL� button. The URL and all its subpaths will be deleted shortly thereafter. This is meant to work in conjunction with the robots.txt file while providing greater responsiveness. Please continue to use the robots.txt protocol to ensure that our crawler does not crawl pages you want to keep out of our index.

� Site Explorer Badge: Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links from the whole web. Go ahead, watch as your site becomes more popular, and show off your link wealth to your visitors.

These features address some of the most popular suggestions that we received on our new board. The full list of suggestions we will be able to address with this release is:
a) Allow removal of invalid or malformed URLs
b) Verification for blogs
c) Authentication Problem
d) More than 25 sitemaps
e) better labeling of TSV files
f) Site explorer should identify itself in the user agent string
g) https / ssl
h) Wait 1 day? (Speed of authentication)

Hope you�ll enjoy the improvements. Please share with us your experience using these features and continue to send us your feedback. It's very valuable to us!


Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar, Apostolos �Lakis� Karmirantzos, Di Chang, Judy Johnson
Yahoo! Search

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Comments

Great! Nice to see the delete URL feature, but it stopped me after only 5 URLs were submitted. There are about 50 more that I need to delete from one site (those URLs have not existed in more than 2 years). How long must I wait before it will let me delete some more?

Posted by: Brian M | January 30, 2007 11:36 AM

Question about the "Delete URLs."

Assuming we do not alter the existing robots.txt file at all:
When a URL is deleted from your index, does your robot recognize this and stop crawling the URL? Or maybe your index recognizes the deletion and stops accepting this URL in the future?

Posted by: Sweimh | January 30, 2007 12:10 PM

The delete URL feature is buggy. I tried to delete a URL that shows up in site explorer for my site (http://www.xuru.com/images/?N=A) and this is what I got in return.

Your request was not accepted because:

* the url was malformed, or
* the url was unreachable, or
* the url was already added

Please double check the url submitted and ensure it is correct.

Isn't the point for me to be able to actually delete invalid & malformed url's from the indexed?

Posted by: Jeremy Luebke | January 30, 2007 01:35 PM

>>We spend a lot of time listening to our users

How about allowing us to opt out of Domain Match then?

Posted by: handsome rob | January 30, 2007 02:26 PM

Thank you for the meta tag option!

One of my clients has an E-Commerce system that is a pain to work with - for security reasons, you can only upload certain types of files, like images. Text isn't on the list. It's stupid, but the platform is otherwise OK.

This helps - thanks.

Ian

Posted by: Ian McAnerin | January 30, 2007 05:31 PM

The turn round time it takes to Authorise a site is my main issue with this release. Surely this can be quicker?

Does yahoo plan to allow users to submit a mobile sitemap as well as a standard one?

Posted by: AndrewRedfern | January 31, 2007 12:32 AM

how do i get my site to show in search engines and how do i build a sitemap?

this is the site:
http://www.emeraldislebangalore.com

Posted by: Jason | February 3, 2007 06:19 PM

cool! I just found out about this and I'm adding it now. Will definitely help my ego :)

Posted by: Alan | February 4, 2007 11:43 PM

!!Great!! i love yahoo and i want to add that Yahoo Rulz once more by providing these type of features.

Posted by: Pushpendra Singh | February 8, 2007 10:00 PM

Yahoo Site Explorer Badge is so cute. I just added it on my Blog at http://seo.g2soft.net/

Now I can track the number of inbond links and show it to others.

Posted by: David Yin | February 20, 2007 12:52 PM

Is yahoo not show its date of indexing the site.

Posted by: Vijay Shrivastava | March 14, 2007 04:40 AM


Hi...

I have just been authenticated by yahoo site explorer..

bbut I couldn't find it as useful as Google sitemaps...

Yes, I could delete old non-existant links from www.architectjaved.com which are in Yahoo index, but I thought tis process is automatic... Those pages were removed more than a year ago, and they are still in Yahoo index!!!

I wonder why... Yahoo bot is lazy in removing non-existent urls

Posted by: www.architectjaved.com | March 15, 2007 10:46 AM

great stuff vote stephen d macmillan president 2008 united states inventer of the internet microcom and technology builder and navy vet and web master the most sites in presidential history

Posted by: presidential stephen d macmillan 2008 | March 21, 2007 10:32 AM

great work I think that will be really helpful to people! I had no problem authorizing my website thanks for making it easy!

Posted by: james kingsted - Domain inform | April 6, 2007 03:00 AM

Does Yahoo Has the ability to bring keyword strategy as google is doing.

Posted by: arslan | April 8, 2007 08:55 PM

Thanks, the delete URL feature looks very handy. I'm needing it mostly because changes propagate so slowly to Yahoo!s index.

Posted by: Johann | April 20, 2007 01:39 AM

Is there a waiting period after a site is authenticated, before you can delete URLs? My site has been authenticated for 3 days, but the delete URL button is still not showing up when I hover over my site's URLs.

Please Advise...

Posted by: Zach | April 27, 2007 04:45 AM

There is some problem. I have made this site to let people download my free intranet e-learning platform at http://ecollege.110mb.com/ , i added it in 'my sites' , and it is authenticated. But when i click on the 'explore' button, it shows that 'We were unable to find any results for the given URL in our index' . What is the problem ?

Posted by: Saurabh Bhide of e-College | May 5, 2007 10:27 PM

Its not as useful and Google sitemap. Please comment.

Posted by: Home Furnishings & Decor | May 9, 2007 09:54 AM

Yahoo must fix this problem quickly....

Posted by: Scented Candles | May 9, 2007 09:55 AM

Something is wrong with the recent algo update. My site was dropped like a rock but other sites with a litle links are raised up high.

Posted by: Sterling Silver CZ Jewelry | May 9, 2007 09:57 AM

Seems like lately Yahoo is looking for keyword on the domain name whether your site is authenticated or not.....

Posted by: Decorative Pillows & Throw Blankets | May 9, 2007 09:59 AM

Anyhow we all should thank Yahoo for the hard work!

Posted by: Dog Clothing & Dog Collars | May 18, 2007 11:25 AM