WebProNews » Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer Work Continues

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:23:36 +0000

People noticed discrepancies in Yahoo Site Explorer’s inlinks counts, which Yahoo has been working to fix.

We recently noted problems with Yahoo Site Explorer, as industry pros saw vastly different results for inlinks when they were logged in to Yahoo, as opposed to being logged out of the service.

Yahoo Search’s Priyank Garg later posted about the odd issue, and said a fix was in the works. That was expected to be rolled out in the next days after his post.

As a broader update to the Yahoo search algorithms was taking place in that timeframe, we asked Yahoo if those ongoing search fixes would have an impact on Site Explorer and its inlinks counting issue.

A Yahoo spokesperson said, “While the two are unrelated we are working on the Site Explorer issues in parallel and updates are expected soon.”

There hasn’t been another update yet on the Yahoo Search blog, so it seems likely the fixes may be continuing to be put in place. Webmasters checking Site Explorer will probably see the fix in place before news of it has been posted, so keep that in mind when using the service.

Yahoo: Pay No Attention To Site Explorer

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:41:28 +0000

Logged in to Site Explorer? Logged out? Those inlink counts looked different because they were, according to Yahoo Search.

Search Engine Roundtable saw something funny with the Yahoo Site Explorer counts. They varied greatly when viewed while logged in to the service as opposed to being logged out.

“57,146 inlinks and 216,880 inlinks is a huge difference in the amount of data one can get about a site,” Barry Schwartz wrote.

“Is it possible that Yahoo is pulling back on showing all linkage data for a site to anyone? Now you need to be the authenticated webmaster to see full data?”

Priyank Garg acknowledged the issue at the Yahoo Search blog today:

While the counts have been incorrect in some cases, the actual returned results have been correct. However, we did roll out a product fix yesterday and will be rolling out a couple more over the next few days to resolve this difference in counts some of you have observed.

Please disregard any counts for inlinks reported by Site Explorer from October 11 through next week.

It sounds like Site Explorer will be back to normal once everyone’s finished with Halloween.

Yahoo Search Scripts Dynamic URL Rewriting

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:44:16 +0000

The beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer allows webmasters to tell Yahoo Search which dynamic parameters they would like the search engine to ignore.

Priyank Garg of Yahoo Search managed to tear himself away from MuggleNet long enough to give webmasters a heads-up on a new feature at Yahoo Search. Their Site Explorer has been updated with a beta test of Dynamic URL Rewriting. Garg explained more at the Yahoo Search blog:

The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly. So you might wonder what the feature really gives you. Utilizing the ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ feature enables:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.

• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.

• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).

• Fewer chances of crawler traps.

• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.

• Better aggregation of link juice to your sites, which can help your pages rank better.

This kind of filtering should be welcomed by site publishers of all kinds who deliver content dynamically. Database driven e-commerce sites in particular should benefit from what should be much better indexing of their products by Yahoo’s crawlers.

Yahoo Remixes Site Explorer

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:16:01 +0000

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.

Yahoo! New Site Explorer Goodies

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:16:37 +0000

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 Updates Site Explorer

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 WebProNews covering technology and business.

Yahoo Unearths Site Explorer Updates

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 21:00:04 +0000

Webmaster fans of Yahoo’s Site Explorer will enjoy the service’s biggest update since December 2005, as Yahoo responds to feedback and requests.

Yahoo followed up yesterday’s Search Builder announcement with a massive update to Site Explorer.

The service has been organized around sites that webmasters want to track. A logged-in user submits a site to Site Explorer, and goes through the authentication process for the site. Once authenticated, Site Explorer users can see extra information about their web sites, and monitor feeds they have published.

Site Explorer will show more information Yahoo has collected, like the last crawl date and the subdomains the crawler has found. They have also made the feed submission smoother, and now permit webmasters to submit RSS, Atom, and URL lists.

Importantly, Yahoo has the UpdateNotification Web Service available. It is part of the Site Explorer API suite in the Yahoo! Developer Network. The UpdateNotification service gives webmasters a quick way to notify Yahoo of site or feed updates.

Yahoo makes a couple of other web services available for Site Explorer. The Page Data service lets webmasters retrieve information “about the subpages in a domain or beneath a path that exists within the Yahoo! Index.”

There is also an Inlink Data service, for retrieving “information about the pages linking to a particular page or pages within a domain.”

Our readers who are enjoying SES 2006 in San Jose will likely want to take a closer look at Site Explorer and its new features after they return home from the conference. It will offer a nice starting point to begin implementing all that new knowledge with their Yahoo campaigns and strategies.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.