Site Explorer takes on Google Webmaster Tools

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Search engines have for years offered advanced search features including those allowing users to limit searches to a specific website or to a particular part of an html page such as the title or URL.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practitioners have long utilized advanced search syntax to verify a web site's visibility, who a company's principal competitors are and to obtain further information useful for improving a client's website visibility.

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On September 29, 2005, shortly after Search Engine Strategies San Jose, Yahoo! launched Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search, a search interface for SEO specific searches. Rather than having to learn arcane search syntax, webmasters using Yahoo!'s Site Explorer simply enter a domain name in the search box. Yahoo Site Explorer then offers:

While these searches are not new to professional SEO practitioners, what is new is the possibility to save the search results in a tab delimited text file suitable for analysis in a spreadsheet program such as OpenOffice Calc. This is a rather nice feature for analysts who don't have the programing skills necessary to implement Yahoo!'s Web Service API or traditional screen scraping.

And unlike the case of some of Google's advanced search operators, Yahoo! is fairly transparent – the results are actually pretty accurate.

Another SES San Jose, more Functionality

After almost a year in service, in conjunction with Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006, Yahoo! announced a few minor enhancements to Site Explorer.

Web site administrators who can verify access to their web site can now see when Yahoo! last crawled each page. While this information is already available to those using web log based Web Analytics packages, it helps fill in a gap for those using JavaScript based solutions. The authentication process entails uploading a text file to the root directory of a website. Unfortunately, this functionality is only available at a site level – a page meta tag authentication method such as Google's is not currently supported.

Google's site verification meta tag technique, not yet supported by Yahoo!:

<meta name="verify-v1" content="unique-string" />

Sprechen Sie Meine Sprache?

Yahoo! also displays the human language detected for each page. While webmasters of English language sites in particular may be underwhelmed by this feature, those with a bit of international experience will appreciate the difficulty a document parser has in detecting the content language. We suggest that sites review this information to insure Yahoo! got it right. We cover the issues involved and Yahoo!'s specific suggestions in our related article How search engines detect document language.

Advanced Searches will be directed to Site Explorer

Two days after Yahoo! released expanded Site Explorer functionality, they announced that all search queries performed using the standard Yahoo! search interface which contain just webmaster specific search operators (i.e. site: linkdomain: link:) would be redirected to the Yahoo! Site Explorer. Searches including keywords in addition to the advanced operators will not be redirected. While the Site Explorer interface benefits those performing SEO analysis, Yahoo! presumably benefits by being better able to provision infrastructure based on projected query demand and potentially differing quality of service (QoS) targets.

Submit a Website Feed to Yahoo!

The biggest change in the Yahoo Site Explorer is a creeping similarity, albeit still limited, to Google's Sitemaps, now called Google Webmaster Tools. In addition to the new information only available to authenticated users, Site Explorer now includes integrated support for webmasters to provide information about their site via an xml sitemap. See our article Yahoo! Sitemap Feed Submission... worth the Effort? for an extended discussion of this topic. We also have made free Yahoo Sitemap submission software available for download.

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Resources

Official Documentation

Discussion Groups

Yahoo! Site Maps Generation Software

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