Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it’s now easier to submit your site to Yahoo Site Explorer: all you have to do is have a valid sitemap.xml file on your site.

With this feature, new stores as well as existing stores with ‘sitemap.xml’ enabled will have access to the toolkit inside Site Explorer. Within a few hours of enabling, you’ll be able to locate your indexed pages and the links to your sites, as well as delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs. To double check if your site was auto-authenticated, take a look in the ‘Source’ column in the ‘My Sites’ page in Site Explorer.

At first glance, it seems like this may make it easier for others to “steal” your site in Site Explorer. However, you still have to authenticate your site ownership using an authentication key or a meta tag.

Earlier this year, Yahoo’s corporate leadership saw a major restructuring, presumably in an effort to turn the tide of their fortunes. A month later, with Yahoo’s disappointing Q2 report, Jerry Yang said that there would be “no sacred cows” for Yahoo, especially over the next 100 days, which he hoped would be a critical period in turning the company around. The Wall Street Journal writes today about Yahoo’s grim progress thus far.

The WSJ reports that at least one sacred cow was considered:

the Web-search-advertising business it built up at great expense in recent years. Under the scenario discussed by top executives, Yahoo would have outsourced that search-advertising activity — which places small text ads next to Web search results — to either Google or Microsoft Corp., the people say. One of these people says Yahoo raised the idea with Google. . . .