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Questions about the new version of Site Explorer touched on a variety of subjects, one of which was authenticating a site with Yahoo.

Several Yahoos contributed to the latest Yahoo Search blog entry with an account of some common themes from questions asked by webmasters in the Yahoo forums.

Many asked about authenticating a site with Yahoo. In response, the Site Explorer team members listed several details about the process:

•  Many of you have noted that the authentication filename is too long. We are changing the prefix we use so that the full filename is much shorter, 27 characters only, within the limits for filenames that we came across.

•  For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.

•  Note that these changes are backward compatible, so if you have the old authentication file name, you don't need to change or re-authenticate. We will look for both key files.
Once the authentication key has been placed on a site, it should not be removed.

Yahoo checks periodically for the key and will unauthenticate a site if the key cannot be found.

They also recommend authenticating at the level the individual has control over content. If that is only a subdirectory under a domain, the key should be placed at that level.

Site Explorer allows webmasters to track how their sites have been performing on Yahoo Search, and ensure Yahoo indexes everything that it should about a given website.

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