Conversations with Webmasters, Take 2

We opened a little window into Yahoo! Search last year when we launched Site Explorer. In doing so, we hoped it would be useful to publishers—providing you with information about the links to and from your site, neatly categorized and displayed in an easy-to-use interface.

Now, we’ve listened to your feedback, and are ready with the next version of Site Explorer—our biggest update since December. Site Explorer is now organized around the sites that you’d like to track. You can explore these sites and add feeds to each site. Once you authenticate your site, you can see much more information about your URLs and monitor feeds that you’ve submitted.

So what’s new?

• There’s more information about the sites you own, including “last crawled” date and more
• Feed submissions are much smoother. You can submit RSS, Atom and URL lists, and manage all of them from one place. For authenticated sites, you can also track when they were submitted and processed.
• We’ve added the Update Notification Web Service for you to notify us of feed or site updates, part of the popular Site Explorer API suite. Since these return the same data as the tool, we recommend using them for automated applications.

What’s more, our new interface has a lot of new details sprinkled all over, such as the expandable results to reduce clutter, the ability to download more URLs from sites you own, and robust authentication. You can share your comments through our feedback form or see what others are saying on the new Site Explorer forum.

—Amit Kumar, Priyank Garg and the Yahoo! Site Explorer Team

A version of this article was originally posted on the Yahoo! Search Blog