Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

One of the ways of making sure that your search engine optimization is getting results is by checking whether your sites pages are actually indexed by major search engines such as Yahoo!.

You can check to see what pages of your site are indexed by searching Yahoo! for "www.mysite.com". While Yahoo! also offers a free site submit option (you must be logged in to use it), the best way to submit your site is by having Yahoo!'s spider follow links from other web pages.

Usually, it takes about 1 week for new sites to get noticed and indexed by major search engines and you should always check your indexed pages frequently. Search engines algorithm changes frequently and you have to stay on top of it

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Yahoo! believes that a hybrid of human review and mathematics works better than just math alone. Sites included in the Yahoo! Directory or in the Yahoo! Search Submit program are given an editorial review. Yahoo! also has their editors review portions of the web. It is believed that sites that receive a review may be given a ranking boost. Yahoo! grants 501(c) tax-exempt organizations and many educational websites free inclusion into the free side of their Content Acquisition Program.

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Not many people knows this but it is a fact that the Yahoo! Search index is also used by AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Even though AltaVista and AllTheWeb feeds from the Yahoo! Search Index, they still use their own algorithm to organize and filter search results. Also, Yahoo! even sometimes uses AllTheWeb and AltaVista as a testing ground to test new algorithms.

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The Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search are two entirely separate things. The directory is a manually reviewed collection of websites. Yahoo! Search is powered through various search technologies purchased by Yahoo!

Yahoo! Search probably serves over 100 million searches each day. The directory would likely be lucky to serve more than a million searches a day.

Yahoo! Search is powered through a rewrite and combination of different pieces of what was once AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi.

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Yahoo! has a tool called Yahoo! Mindset that allows you to place greater emphasis on commercial or informational results.

By default, Google tends to bias the search results heavily toward informational resources. This makes business sense for them for many reasons:

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Backlinks is another way of saying "links into a page". When you check backlinks in Yahoo!, ('linkdomain:www.whateversite.com'), it shows most of the known links into a site. Yahoo! has also had some trouble with 301 redirects and may show the wrong URL locations for some of the backlinks.

You can check the backlinks into your home page specifically by specifying the full URL of the home page ("link:http://www.whateversite.com/").
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Yahoo's patent applications provides a list of 51 web page elements that can be analyzed to determine the clutter of a web page:

• Total number of links
• Total number of words
• Total number of images (non-ad images)
• Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
• Dimensions of page
• Page area (total)
• Page length
• Total number of tables
• Maximum table columns (per table)
• Maximum table rows (per table)
• Total rows
• Total columns
• Total cells
• Average cell padding (per table)
• Average cell spacing (per table)
• Dimensions of fold

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Backlinks is another way of saying "links into a page".

When you check backlinks in Google (link:www.whateversite.com,) it only shows a small sampling of your total backlinks. Many links that do not show up when you use the "link:" function in Google still count for your relevancy scoring. In addition, there is a time delay between when links are created and when they will show up in search results.

To get a more accurate picture of links, you will also want to check backlinks using Yahoo! or MSN. Yahoo! typically shows many more backlinks than Google. The code to check Yahoo! backlinks to a site is "linkdomain:www.site.com."

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It seems that Search Spiders is currently messing around with new robots.txt commands. If your robots.txt file accidentally contains some of the new commands, it is possible that the robots.txt file commands Search Spiders to not index your site.

What is a robots.txt file?
The robots.txt file is a small text file that must be placed at your root folder (http://www.anysite.com/robots.txt). It tells the search engine bot which section on your website has to be indexed and which section should be de-indexed.

You may use text editor to generate a robots.txt file. The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called "records".

Records the information for a particular search engine bot. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent data and one or more Disallow data. Here's an example:

User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This robots.txt file would allow the bot "googlebot", which is the search engine spider of Google, to index every section from your website and not including files from the "cgi-bin" folder. All files in the "cgi-bin" folder will be ignored by googlebot.
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