A while back we reported that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were joining forces to provide consistent sitemap protocol. Following the path of Google Webmaster's Tools with their Google Sitemaps, Yahoo has finally done the same. "Yahoo Sitemaps" has been created. Yahoo announced yesterday that upgrades have been made to their Site Explorer Authentication Process.

What this means is that similar to Google Sitemaps (now Webmaster Tools) you can authenticate your site in Yahoo using Meta tags and can view various diagnostic stats through the Yahoo Site Explorer tool. Some of the key features announced include:

Site Authentication using META tags: For those who are unable to upload an authentication file to their site, such as a blog, you will now be able to authenticate your site in Site Explorer by including an authentication key as part of a META tag on the home page of your site.

Detailed Authentication Errors: Yahoo now provides detailed errors on authentication failures, making it much easier to diagnose possible problems. I was waiting for these diagnostic tools as they can be beneficial in determining if there are issues with certain sections of youy site.

Delete URLs: In conjunction with the robots.txt file, for your authenticated sites, you can now delete any URLs from the index. Simply locate the URL in Site Explorer and click on the ‘Delete URL’ button. The URL and all its subpaths will be deleted shortly thereafter. Yahoo states that the goal here is in providing greater responsiveness. They also state that you should continue to use the robots.txt protocol to ensure that the Yahoo Slurp crawler does not crawl pages you want to keep out of the Yahoo index.

Site Explorer Badge: You can Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links from the whole web. Yahoo goes on to state, "watch as your site becomes more popular, and show off your link wealth to your visitors. " Not sure about this, we'll have to look into this feature a bit more.

Overall this is great as using the Yahoo Site Authentication process you can help guide the Yahoo Spiders to the content that you want indexed in Yahoo. For more on the upgrade to Yahoo's Site Authentication Process visit the Yahoo Search blog. If you haven't used Yahoo Site Explorer be sure to check it out, it's great for checking your site's external link inventory.