Optimizing For The New Yahoo

By Garrett French - Wed, 02/18/2004 - 13:07

Well, it's official. Yahoo's now deploying their new algorithmic search technology and you'll see it rolling out across their network in the next couple of weeks. (Good timing for the Search Engine Strategies Conference, eh? Yahoo's sure to be the big buzz now.)

The only question now is how do you optimize your site for the new Yahoo?

Driving Traffic With The New Yahoo

To answer that let's get to know their new spider, YahooSlurp, and how he looks at web pages.

Jim Hedger of StepForth investigated and reported some basic facts that will be important to how you optimize your pages:

YahooSlurp will work a lot like GoogleBot in that it will follow every HREF link on found a website. YahooSlurp will NOT follow SRC links such as images or FRAMES. When optimizing a site that uses FRAMES, correct use of the <noframes> tag will be necessary.

YahooSlurp can follow dynamic links but Yahoo is advising webmasters to post static pages with HREF (text) links directed to specific sections featuring dynamic content. This tells us that the use of a sitemap will continue to be an SEO Best Practice technique.

Yahoo will respect common ROBOTS.TXT statements. For more information on ROBOTS.TXT files, please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html

Paying to get into Inktomi database should attract more attention from YahooSlurp. I am pretty sure if YahooSlurp will find your site if you don't pay however paying will buy you much greater frequency of visits from the Slurp spider.

Inktomi is very old-school when it comes to Keyword densities, keyword arrangement and simple-site structure. Optimizing for Inktomi is a lot like optimizing for AltaVista was a few years back (without the leader-pages and gateways that were once so popular).Jim left us with an excellent question: "what is the relationship between Directory and Algorithmic listings?"

I'll be sure to follow up on that one, especially since the Yahoo Directory Debate is still going on. Thanks Jim!

Visit YahooSearch and tell us what you think of the results!

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry's eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.

News Tags: Yahoo, HTTP

About the author:
Garrett French is the editor of iEntry's eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.

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