Updated Spring 2013 to reflect changes in Yahoo Webmaster Tools.
In 2010 Yahoo Webmaster Tools was integrated into Bing Webmaster Tools.
Why Sign-Up for Yahoo Webmaster Tools?
Like the webmaster tools on the other search engines it’s free; and it also gives you some really nice features that the other tools do not!
Of course most of these backlink and SEO tools have been neatly wrapped up into one easy-to-use interface on our platform, but if you want to just see what Yahoo sees, then you can also use Yahoo Site Explorer.
We always set up a webmaster tools account with each of the major search engines for every website we optimise. We do this because it’s a good safeguard to check you are doing everything correctly for each engine. There are also some useful tools and checks you can regularly make and it only takes 15 minutes to set up!
Here is what we use Yahoo Webmaster Tools for:
- Submitting XML sitemaps to Yahoo (video sitemaps and html sitemaps)
- Checking for crawl errors
- Rarely for removing dynamic URL parameters from your URLs and deleting URLs
- Checking website statistics and backlinks: e.g. You get this kind of useful breakdown
- Crawled Pages: 3,330
- All Known Pages: 22,658
- Known Hosts on This Site: 2
- Hosts linking to Site: 249
- Domains linking to Site: 197
- Hosts Outlinked from Site: 1,532
- Domains Outlinked from Site: 879
Yahoo Site Explorer is particularly useful for showing you how many pages you have in Yahoo’s index and also how many backlinks (“Inlinks”) you have to your site. You can also exclude your own domain so you get a pretty comprehensive list which you can also download.
Setting Up Yahoo Webmaster Tools – Step-by-Step Guide
1. Go to Yahoo Webmaster Tools and sign-in if you already have a Yahoo account, or follow the link to create a new account.
2. In Webmaster Tools – click on the link that says “Add My Site” and enter your site’s details.
3. Click on the “Explorer” button from the list of websites; and then click on the “Authentication” link and follow the instructions on screen. You can either choose to upload a specific HTML file to the root directory of your website or add a meta-tag to your home page. Either example works well; but we tend to use the HTML file.
4. Please note, if you manage more than one website; unlike Google and Bing Yahoo does not give you the same verification key for each site you manage (even from the same webmaster account) so you need to create a unique Yahoo key for every site you want to manage. Once you have done this you can manage all your websites from one interface.
5. Once you have uploaded the relevant file then you can click on “Verify” and Yahoo will give you access to all the relevant data it has about your website.
