New Version of Yahoo! Site Explorer

[tag]Yahoo![/tag] [[YHOO]] has announced a new version of [tag]Site Explorer[/tag] that addresses some of the top-rated suggestions from users.

The key features are:

• Site Authentication using META tags: You can now 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: Yahoo! now provides 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. Yahoo! suggests making permanent changes via the robots.txt file.
• Site Explorer Badge: Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links (site or page) from the whole web.

Conspicuously absent is any mention of the XML sitemap format that they have promised to support. To cover all possibilities, I submit an urllist.txt, sitemap.xml, and RSS feeds for each of my websites.