Yahoo! Stores Auto-Authorize for Submission to Yahoo! Site Explorer

by Paul Boisvert

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Friday, September 7th, 2007

The major search engines all have tools that help website owners inform them of all current site pages and any updates to those pages. Since last year, we’ve enabled users to submit their sites using a standard format. Now we’re making it even easier to submit sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the site submission tool for Yahoo! Search.

Previously, the process of submitting a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions site to Yahoo! Site Explorer required users to register with Yahoo! Site Explorer and then enter keys for authentication in Store Manager. Now, all you have to do is make sure that you have enabled sitemap.xml and your site will be submitted to Yahoo! Site Explorer automatically once it is open for business.

You can opt-in to enabling sitemap.xml from the “Search Engines” link within the Store Manager. For more information about the Sitemap feature, consult the Sitemap help.

By automatically authenticating your site in Site Explorer, and submitting your content, you are ready-to-go to use Site Explorer for its many other features. You can:

• Find out which pages are indexed by Yahoo! Search and when your site was last visited by the crawlers. This gives you a picture of the current state of your site’s presence in search.
• See who is linking to you. You may be able to build even stronger relationships with these sites by reaching out to them personally. You can even look to see who is linking to your competitors. This can give you leads for generating more traffic.
• Delete pages you don’t want indexed from Yahoo! Search
• Let Yahoo! know about the dynamic URL parameters that you want us to rewrite. This can help reduce duplicate pages and link fragmentation from your site.

Auto-authentication for Yahoo! Site Explorer allows you to spend less time on site submission so you can focus on more important tasks to drive traffic such as building better internal links in product descriptions or optimizing your product pages with converting keywords.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Editor’s Note: At the SES Site Clinic a few weeks back, Rob Snell, Yahoo! store owner and author, made extensive use of Site Explorer to diagnose linking issues. Not only should you use the tool to view links for your own site, you can also use it as a competitive research tool to check which links your competitors are getting. You may then be able to get links from the same suppliers, groups, or people. Rob will be posting more tips from the Site Clinic session shortly.–Paul

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