Yahoo! have launched a new version of Site Explorer today, the 30th of January 2007. The new features on this version of Site Explorer are:
- User / site authentication via Meta tags, similar to the way Google Sitemaps does
- Deletion of pages from the index, to eliminate any pages that should have been blocked from being indexed. This feature is meant to be used along with robots.txt.
- Site Explorer Badge
According to Yahoo! this release addresses a number of user suggestions on the Site Explorer Suggestion Board, including:
a) Allowing removal of invalid or malformed URLs
b) Verification for blog ownership without requiring file upload to the root directory
c) Resolving authentication problems
d) Enabling submission of more than 25 sitemaps
e) Including an identifying value to TSV file labels to enable differentiation of multiple files
f) Identifying itself as Site Explorer in the user agent string, rather than pretending to be IE
g) Enabling addition of sites using https / ssl
h) Increasing speed of authentication to less than 1 day.
