Ideas have been popping onto the Site Explorer Suggestion Board over the past year, and some of them have made it into the latest version of the Site Explorer webmaster tool.
Yahoo has been trying to listen to what its users want from the Site Explorer tool that launched way back in 2005. The gang at Yahoo Search made that a little easier by constructing the Suggestion Board.
The good bits from those submitted suggestions have made their way into Site Explorer’s latest release. Some of the top rated suggestions on the Board were adopted by the Search team, and lovingly crafted into the updated product.
They provided a helpful list of what’s new at the Yahoo Search Blog:
• 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.
For Yahoo’s webmaster fans, the Delete URLs should be a welcome addition to Site Explorer. Duplicate or orphaned pages hanging around Yahoo’s index can be dispatched to that great 404 in the sky. In contrast, Google wants a 404 result from a page to permit an automatic request to remove it to take place.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
