Yahoo Site Explorer: meta tag authentication on Blogger, etc

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Yahoo Site Explorer: meta tag authentication on Blogger, etc

Sunday, February 11, 2007

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I blogged previously about Yahoo Site Explorer (more info) and bemoaned the inability for Blogger users, and bloggers on other blogging platforms who can't upload files to their blog host's server, to authenticate their blogs (see my previous post for more about Yahoo Site Explorer and why you'd want to submit your blog or site to it).

After many requests for it, Yahoo have finally introduced authentication via inserting a special meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags of your blog template or layout (see Yahoo howto on authentication - you'll probably need to scroll down the Authentication page to find the meta tag).

I tried it and sure enough, within 24 hours, my blog was authenticated with Yahoo and I was able to access the greater information available from Yahoo as to how it crawls and indexes my blog. But it didn't seem to pick up my feed automatically, I had to submit it manually. (Or have I got that wrong, has anyone else noticed this?)

You have to resubmit your site or feed to "ping" Yahoo each time you want to let Yahoo know your site has been updated e.g. with a new post, so their crawler knows to come and reindex your site or blog - you can click Manage next to the site URL, then the Resubmit button.

One remaining issue with Yahoo Site Explorer is that I have to submit my Blogger Atom or RSS feed. I can't submit my Feedburner feed, even if I'd prefer to, because I'd have to authenticate ownership of Feedburner's website to do that, which of course I can't do!

(Thanks to sfchicken for drawing attention to this.)

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2 Comment(s):

I used the meta tags and it failed every time. When saving the template Blogger modifies the tag. Site explorer wont authenticate.

(By dwayne, at Thursday, March 01, 2007 2:22:00 PM) Edit Comment

Dwayne, that's interesting. In what way does Blogger modify the tag when saving please, can you post what it changes it to? I've not had that problem myself. Have you tried pasting the meta tag just before the </head> tag?

(By Improbulus, at Tuesday, March 20, 2007 8:42:00 AM) Edit Comment