When you have registered your site, you can immediately begin tracking the list of feeds for that site that are known by Yahoo!. But there is more data that we would like to share with you. To ensure that your data is secure, we have a simple site authentication process. The authentication process lets us know that we are showing your data only to you and not to any other person. You can initiate the authentication process from your list of registered sites in My Sites.

We will generate a random file name with the authentication key for that site and make it available for download. Please download this authentication key file and copy it in the root directory of your site. If you prefer not to download the file, the filename and key are also listed on the download page. You can directly create the file in your site root with the given name and the authentication key as the only contents of the file.

After you have put the file in your site root, let us know by clicking the Ready to Authenticate button. After this, we will check your site root for the presence of the authentication key file. After our crawler is able to retrieve the authentication key file from the site root, the authentication process will be complete.

When you authenticate your site, you will have the following additional information about your site at your fingertips:

• The status of your submitted feeds, when they were last processed and when you submitted it, or last pinged us for a feed
• Additional information for the pages in your site, including the language as detected by us, and the last time we crawled the page
• List of subdomains from your site in the index (if your site was a host such as yahoo.com)