If you're not yet familiar with Yahoo! Site Explorer, then I would recommend using it on your web site. It's a good resource for web site owners to gain insight into their site's presence in Yahoo!. The tool shows which of the site's pages are indexed and which pages are linking to the site (inbound links). If you go through the process of verifying that you are the site owner (authentication), then additional information is available, including what subdomains of the site are indexed by Yahoo!, when the Yahoo! web crawler last visited the site, and additional site metadata such as language. Detailed information about Site Explorer can be found in the Yahoo! help area. Note that Yahoo! also recently announced that normal queries on their search engine using 'site:', 'link:', 'linkdomain:' will be redirected to the Site Explorer results page.

It's nice to see a major search engine making efforts to help web site owners learn about their site's visibility. Google is making similar efforts with their Webmaster Tools. To date, Microsoft has not yet created any tools to assist web site owners, but hopefully we'll see this change in the future.

Using Site Explorer is as simple as entering a URL into the search form. Unlike Yahoo! Search, Site Explorer accepts a URL instead of search terms. A list of all URLs indexed for the domain and all subdomains are presented in the results, but if desired, this can be limited to the primary domain only. When mousing over a result, you'll find a couple of buttons on the right hand side. The "Explore URL" button will perform another query on the specific URL and show all of the inbound links for the page.

Note that the results generated by Site Explorer can be exported into a tab-separated value file, which can be pasted into a spreadsheet. This is a useful feature that enables site owners to collect and store information about the site over time. Building a collection of data is a good idea, because it will allow you to establish some bench marks to measure against as you make changes to your site content. Sites that have been authenticated have the option to download all 1,000 results returned in a single file.

Site Explorer allows you to submit URLs or "feeds" to help Yahoo! index more of your site's content. It's a good idea to submit your site map, and any other pages that contain significant content you want to ensure is indexed. Feeds can be submitted in RSS format, Atom format, or as a text file containing a list of URLs.

Site Explorer also supports the use of Yahoo! Web Services PageData API. As a courtesy to Yahoo!, it's recommended to use the API service if you intend to do a lot of querying for site information. As noted on their documentation, the Page Data and Inlink services are limited to 5,000 queries per IP address per day.

Conclusion
Web site managers should take every opportunity they can to ensure their site content is well represented in the major search engines. Site Explorer is a useful tool that provides insight into a web site's visibility in Yahoo!. Considering the fact that use of Site Explorer is free, it's well worth the time spent to authenticate your web site with Yahoo! and put this valuable tool to use.

                 ← What is this?