Yahoo has added some new features to its Site Explorer tool, which you can find at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com .

New features include the ability to authenticate (“claim”) your site with META tags. You can still upload a file if you’d rather; this is another method. Yahoo is also providing more details for authentification errors and allowing users to delete URLs from authenticated sites from the index. (Yahoo did note that this feature should be used with robots.txt, and not instead of robots.txt.)

Yahoo is also offering a “badge” that you can put on your site that shows a counter of incoming links. I hereby declare counter badges the bell bottom pants of the Internet. They were hot about seven years ago and they fell out of fashion. And now they’re back again. Dear Yahoo, please do not bring back parachute pants. Thanking you in advance.