- Show all subpages within a URL indexed by Yahoo!
- Show the inlinks to a URL indexed by Yahoo!
- Submit missing URLs, one at a time or in lists, to Yahoo! free of charge.
An updated version was launched in December last year following requests from webmasters that wanted to be able to show the inlinks to their URLs indexed by Yahoo!, with or without internal links. The update provided a filter to exclude internal links (per domain and sub-domain) amongst other improvements.
At that time Priyank Garg, a Product Manager at Yahoo! Search, asked webmasters to:
"[Continue to] send us feedback, tell us how the product works for you, and let us know what else you'd like to see".
Well it seems that Priyank been taken up on the offer and, as a result, Yahoo! Search has just launched a new, improved, version of Site Explorer (still Beta, though!).
Yahoo! Search details the new features as follows:
- More information about your sites, including: Last Crawled Date and Language for your Site URLs; Site Subdomains; and Smoother feed submissions.
You can submit RSS, Atom and URL lists, and manage all of them from one place. For authenticated sites, you can also track when they were submitted and processed. There is also an Update Notification Web Service to notify Yahoo! of feed or site updates.
Once inside Site Explorer (you need to register for a Yahoo! ID) you can now add your sites and authenticate them as you would with Google sitemaps. Further good news is that XML submission is now available, and so the automated updating of your site is much more effective.
One question that's already been raised by a webmaster was "'Submitting a txt file with a URL list' - it sounds as if we have to re-submit when ever there are changes? Or will this be checked up on every now and then?" The quick response from Priyank was:
"Any URLs or feeds we have in the crawler, we will refresh periodically based on our algorithms, but you are welcome to notify us of updates using the UpdateNotification API and we will use that as additional input to direct our crawl".
Another question that's been posed is: "Can you add an alternate mechanism for authentication like 'inserting a meta tag'...because bloggers on Blogspot or MSN Spaces or Yahoo 360, who have no access to their servers, may not be able to upload the file and authenticate the site."
It certainly looks like Priyank and the Yahoo! Site Explorer Team will continue to receive the feedback they've been asking for! This can only be good for Yahoo! Search's market share as webmasters and other interested parties find themselves being listened to and treated like the customers they are.
It seems as though Google's Sitemap Submission process has finally provoked a little competition.
