Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Yahoo! created a free question-answering service and includes many of these questions and answers in their search results.

The idea of integrating Yahoo! user questions and answers directly into the search results shows how much Yahoo! wants to keep their users on the Yahoo.com domain and how much Yahoo! wants to be the most important content site on the web. Compare that strategy to Google who wants to send away visitors as quickly as possible and hope they come back.

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Looking for an easy and efficent keyword ranking tracker? I found one Shawn Hogan's Digital Point keyword ranking tracker allows webmasters to track their Google, Yahoo!, and MSN rankings for free, although it will require you to place a php page on your server.

You can also look for other Yahoo! SEO Tools at the Yahoo! Developer Network.

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Mike Grehan interviewed Jon Glick of Yahoo! Search, and he stated that the meta description tag is treated similar to page content. He also stated that the meta keywords tag is used for inclusion into a subset of search results, but has no effect on relevancy. I also covered the issue of meta tags above in the meta tag section earlier in this e-book.

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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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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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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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