Yahoo's Site Explorer

There is a lot of interesting reading in the SES coverage by Search Engine Roundable. Currently I'm a little sitemap addicted, thus Tim Mayer's announcement got my attention:

Tim announces a new product named Site Explorer, where you can get your linkage data. It is a place for people to go to see which pages Yahoo indexed and to let Yahoo know about URLs Yahoo has not found as of yet .... He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API...), then you hit explore URL and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo's index and also shows you the number of inbound links. You can sort pages by "depth" (how deep pages are buried) and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format.

Sounds like a pretty comfortable tool to do manual submissions, harvest data for link development etc. etc. Unfortunately it's not yet life, I'd love to read more about the API. The concept outlined above makes me think that I may get an opportunity to shove my fresh content into Yahoo's index way faster than today, because in comparison to other crawlers Yahoo! Slurp is a little lethargic:

Crawler stats (tiny site)	Page Fetches	robots.txt Fetches
Googlebot	7755	30	73.34 MB	11 Aug 2005 - 00:03
MSNBot	1627	98	39.86 MB	10 Aug 2005 - 23:38
Yahoo! Slurp	385	204	13.61 MB	10 Aug 2005 - 23:53

I may be misleaded here, but Yahoo's Site Explorer announcement could indicate that Yahoo will not implement Google's Sitemap Protocol. That'll be a shame.

Tim Mayer in another SES session:
Q: "Is there a way to do the Google sitemaps type system at Yahoo?"
Tim: We just launched the feed to be able to do that. We will be expanding the products into the future.


Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Yahoo Google Sitemaps

Stumble It!

Post it to del.icio.us