Yahoo Sitemaps

Yahoo like Google allows you to submit a sitemap. The purpose being to let Yahoo know about all the pages in your site.

Not submitting a sitemap doesn't mean that your site will not be indexed by Yahoo, but it may take longer before Yahoo indexes all of the pages.

It is not known however if submitting a sitemap helps your site get indexed quicker, however It certainly won't do the opposite.

The procedure is

• generate the sitemap and Upload the sitemap to the website

• Add sitemap using the Yahoo Site explorer

• Authenticate request

Generate the Sitemap

Yahoo now supports the same  sitemap format as Google and so you can use the Google sitemap and submit it to Yahoo.

You can generate a sitemap using either and

• Online generator -Most are free but are usually limited to around 500 entries ( sufficient for most sites). Here are two that I have used http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-www.steves-internet-guide.com.html or http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

• Offline generator- These install on your PC and usually require payment however a free tool I have recently tried, and was impressed how easy it was to use is The SOFTplus GSiteCrawler Google Sitemap generator. This tool installs on your PC and will even ftp the sitemap to your site when finished. It also has an automate mode which creates and uploads the file automatically.

The file is normally called sitemap.xml and you upload this to your website, normally using FTP.

Adding Sitemap using the Yahoo Site Explorer

You will need a Yahoo account (a yahoo email account will do) to add the sitemap. So if you don't presently have one you will need to get one which you can do on the site explorer logon page.

1. Go the Yahoo Site Explorer submit Page

Here you can submit your site to Yahoo and also a sitemap. If your site is already listed in Yahoo then only submit the sitemap. If your site isn't currently listed in Yahoo then submit it using the Submit a website or webpage part of the form.

Just enter the full path and filename e.g.

and then click submit feed. On the right side of the page, you see a "Site Not Authenticated" message like this:

Click this button and proceed to authenticate the sitemap

Authenticating the Sitemap

Both Yahoo and Google require that you prove that you are the site owner before they will accept the sitemap from you. Yahoo offers two methods.

Method 1

1. It gives you a file containing a key and gets you to place this file on your site. As only you should be able to add files to your site the fact that you can do it means you are the owner.

This is the method I use and we will go through below.

Click the download button (screenshot below) and copy the file to your PC then upload the file to your site (using FTP) do no change the file in any way.

In step 2 of the screenshot Yahoo show you where it expects to find the file.

Once the file is on the server click Ready to Authenticate

You will be taken to a confirmation page saying that your site is pending authentication click the My sites link to see the status.

Here you can see the status as Pending.

It normally takes a few hours before the site status changes to failed or authenticated. If you get a failed message then you need to check the failure reason, correct it, and re-authenticate.

Authentication Method 2

Instead of uploading a file you can edit your home page and insert a special meta tag in it. You then upload the home page to the site and yahoo will check for it as proof.

The screen shot is show below

You only need to do one or the other not both.

Related articles and resources:

• Google Sitemaps
• Google Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools

 

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