'Net Features : yahoo site explorer

Yahoo! Announces New Details of Alliance with Bing

Linc Wonham — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:30:00 GMT

Yahoo! updated its search blog today with the latest news regarding the Yahoo!-Microsoft search alliance, which begins later this week when Bing starts powering Yahoo’s organic search listings in the U.S. and Canada.

We recently posted Five Steps to Becoming Bing-ready as well as an in-depth look at Bing’s New Webmaster Tools to help make the transition go more smoothly for website owners. Today Yahoo! wrote that while webmasters should familiarize themselves with Bing's tools as quickly as possible, that they should continue to provide their site information to Yahoo! using Yahoo’s Site Explorer for the time being. The reason provided is that worldwide implementation of the search alliance will not be completed until early 2012, and Yahoo! search results in many parts of the world will continue to be powered by Yahoo! until that time.

To ensure that business owners and webmasters receive the highest quality traffic from search results powered by both engines throughout the transition, Yahoo! wrote that it will share all site information provided on Site Explorer with Microsoft. Yahoo! also announced its decision to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences on October 1. For developers who wish to retain their codes, the company asked that they export them by that date.

For continued updates, FAQs and to leave comments about the transition process, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Updates

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:16:00 GMT

Finally, some signs of life from Yahoo Search!

Yahoo announced it has updated its Site Explorer to include new data (for page-level and site-level) including key terms, delicious.com activities, top delicious tags and Search Monkey Objects. These additions come about one month after Yahoo added top queries and URLs to the tool.

At the page level, Site Explorer users will be able to see SearchMonkey object statistics. You will need to have marked up pages (or provided Yahoo with a feed that matches one of their existing SearchMonkey templates) but if you have your page will show all SearchMonkey objected that were indexed for that page.

Yahoo has also included Yahoo Search key terms and delicious bookmark information for pages, giving you a good way to explore all sort of metadata about your pages. Site Explorer now also provides a site-level dashboard that displays additional information, including the number of SearchMonkey feeds you submitted and a history of any custom actions you have requested for your site (such as defining URL query parameters that you want Yahoo to ignore).

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Not Appearing in Yahoo!? It's Your Fault

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:40:00 GMT

Whatever happened to the customer is always right? Take heed - if someone says your service is broken (even if it's not), you may just want to listen, not point fingers, and take the heat. Otherwise, you'll risk some negative feelings - especially if it happens on a support forum.

An interesting thread has been occuring on the Yahoo! Site Explorer Suggestion Board now for one month about Yahoo! not indexing a webmaster's pages and not counting links properly. Apparently, only one page of the webmaster's site was indexed (the home page), when several thousand pages had been indexed before, and, the number of backlinks dropped from several hundred to zero. Instead of trying to figure out the problem on his own, a Yahoo Site Explorer employee suggested that the site may be in violation of content guidelines and suggested that the webmaster contact Yahoo Search Customer Care to figure out if he was in violation of said guidelines. I don't know about you, but if someone told me I was in violation of some guidelines and I wasn't, I would not be pleased.

Fortunately, another moderater joined the conversation and said the Site Explorer statistics page "is not reliable at present and is showing zero counts for some sites that are crawled and indexed successfuly." Clearly the latter response was not easy to admit, but it did/does solve the problem of a customer inquiring as to what is actually happening.

I tested Site Explorer this morning and found no errors. If Site Explorer is having issues providing accurate information about your website, visit http://search.yahoo.com and search on 'site:mysite.com' to receive a result page showing your correct page counts.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Enhancements

Administrator — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:48:00 GMT

Yahoo!'s Site Explorer service is an excellent way for web professionals to understand how their sites are being indexed in Yahoo! search. You have the ability nopw to submit feeds, delete URLs, report SPAM and even rewrite dynamic URLs - all very useful features that help Web pro's shorten the road to "indexing success" at Yahoo. But the service is positioning itself to get much better.

Site Explorer got an upgrade yesterday which provides an interface that will better accomodate future feature rollouts. The enhanced service features a Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites including the number of feeds being processed, the number of pages indexed, the number of authenticated users, number of actions and their status and the number of URL parameter rewrite rules. Yahoo! even increased the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10.

Overall, it's not a major development but it does show that Yahoo! continues to focus on search.