WebProNews

The webmaster tool from Yahoo has emerged from beta after a couple of years of testing and tweaking, with new features added to the product.

Yahoo Remixes Site Explorer

Deals and product releases tend to be the rule during Search Engine Strategies conferences. Yahoo grabbed some notice with their Viacom advertising deal for many of the media company's websites, and that should lead into a flurry of search announcements.

Yahoo delivered on that with something much more near and dear to the hearts of our webmaster readership. Their feedback about the Site Explorer has led to some functionality tweaks and feature additions.

They took a big step by dropping the 'beta' label from Site Explorer, now with a couple of years in operation to its credit. The Yahoo Search blog credited the development and testing of the Delete URL feature as a milestone in moving Site Explorer out of beta.

A couple of features attached to Delete URL have a prominent place in this release:

• Input URLs for Delete -- You now have more flexibility. You can modify the URL or path you want to delete on the confirmation page.
• Delete more than five invalid URLs -- Your limit has increased from five. Remember, as before, each delete can rid a whole path of URLs.

Webmasters who develop mobile sites can submit them to Site Explorer. Their mobile crawler can index RSS or Atom feeds, as well as Sitemaps.

Mobile development should be something Yahoo continues to nudge, as they compete with all the major Internet players for the handset-carrying pockets of people everywhere. Yahoo recently updated its mobile search product to work faster for people, but having more mobile-positioned content for those searches will make their mobile search even more appealing.