As, I reported yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they launched new features for their Site Explorer Tool. As an FYI, Site Explorer went live September 29, 2005, it was the first of its kind, until Google came out with Sitemaps, followed by a name change to Google Webmaster Central. (Google Sitemaps came out first, sorry for the mistake, I guess I am losing it. :))
The features Yahoo! added includes:
- Site Authentication using META tags
- Detailed Authentication Errors
- Delete URLs
- Site Explorer Badge
The first two are cool. The last one, Site Explorer Badge, we spotted and reported on yesterday, before they announced it.
Delete URLs scares me a bit. As soon as I heard, I changed my Yahoo! ID password to something more secure.
All you need to do is login to your account (or someone elses) and click the delete URL. I didn't try it, but I would hope there is an added layer of confirmation. Maybe a requirement to add a meta tag or something to confirm it, or maybe an additional confirmation email to a non-Yahoo! email account?
In any event, I would change my password on my Yahoo! account, so maybe you should think of that.
Tim Mayer from Yahoo! explains a bit more about the delete URL feature:
If I use Delete URL, do I also need to use Robots.txt? Yes. Once you've used Delete URL to remove a URL from our index, we recommend using robots.txt to exclude the content from being added to out indexed again. Robots.txt excludes Yahoo!'s crawler (Slurp) from re-indexing your content. A robots.txt exclusion rule reduces the number of pages Slurp will read from your server. It also helps you save bandwidth on your website. Note: Site Explorer Delete URL service facilitates the quick removal of your URL from our index and is helpful when a URL that you have excluded, continues to show up as a thin document, but it may not prevent our crawler from continuing to crawl the URL again. It is not an alternative to using robots.txt.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
