Yahoo site explorer and .asia domains – problem still

Yahoo is still process of fixing the problem where .asia domains are not verifiable in their site explorer, A poster in yahoo site explorer suggestion board points out this problem,

“Hi,I am trying to submit my .asia domains that I have registered and I
keep getting error messages. (error 3) My new .com domains go through fine. Any
ideas or reason why I cannot get my .asia domains entered for a crawl?”

Yahoo! Site Explorer employee Tim has replied asking for the URLs,

Please let us know your site URL or your y_key contents and we’ll be happy
to investigate.

suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer

Microsoft threatens to take on Yahoo if it doesn’t meet its deadline

Meet between Microsoft and yahoo

Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. senior authorities met this week to talk about Microsoft’s offer to obtain the Internet giant Company yahoo but were unsuccessful to determine any of their differences, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Microsoft executives had no interest to increase their cash-and-stock offer, and the Yahoo camp went on to say no to enter formal negotiations without a sickly bid, people known with the matter say. Yahoo’s board discarded Microsoft’s original bid in February, and Yahoo’s senior executive might see no point in investment talks on the basis of that offer.

Microsoft’s cash-and0stock offer was designated at $44.6 billion during Jan. 31, but a drop in the software maker’s share price has decreased the value to about $42 billion, or $29.29 a share. On Thursday, Yahoo shares traded at $28.13 at 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Exchange composite trading.

Yahoo sitemap – how to submit yahoo sitemap to yahoo search

There are some people who have trouble submitting their sitemap to yahoo or don’t know where to submit their sitemap. Yahoo accepts the standard sitemaps.org xml protocol. Sitemaps created with sitemaps.org protocol is much standard now and is accepted by yahoo, google and MSN search engines. They also accept urllist.txt through their site explorer.

Go to site explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites authenticate your site by following yahoo’s authentication process and submit your sitereemap there, You can also submit your blog or your site as a feed to yahoo,

“What kinds of feeds do yahoo support?
You can provide the feeds in the following supported formats. Yahoo do recognize files with .gz extension as compressed files and decompress them before parsing.
RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0,
Sitemaps, as documented on http://www.sitemaps.org/
Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
A text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt; for a compressed file the name must be urllist.txt.gz.
Yahoo! supports feeds for Mobile sites. When submitting a feed that points to content on the mobile web, please indicate the encoding of the content—either xHTML or WML. (From the Manage Sites page, click the arrow to the left of Add Feed to select feed type.) Submitting mobile feeds directs our mobile search crawlers to discover and crawl new content for our mobile index. “

Ranking in First page in google not in top 1000 in yahoo – yahoo banned

I know many of you wondered why they don’t rank anywhere in yahoo but are in top 10 in Google results. Most of the time yahoo’s ranking criteria is same as google’s but there are somethings which will prevent your site from ranking in yahoo

Here is a simple checklist criteria that you need to make sure for your no rankings problems with yahoo:

1. Make sure your site is not penalized or banned by yahoo, Yahoo is very good at doing this they are more tougher than google when it comes to penalty. Check whether your site gets indexed in yahoo make sure your pages are there. If you just see your homepage and not your inner pages then its still a problem. If you feel that your site is banned or penalized file for a reinclusion into yahoo. We do offer a reinclusion services in our company for Google, yahoo and MSN. We don’t have any tie up with any search engine but we will make sure we follow all their guidelines clean up every single possible mess with the site and submit it to the for a reconsideration request. Have a banned site in yahoo or feel its banned feel free to contact us through our contact form and please explain what you did or doing on your site,

2. Remember to have backlinks from sites which yahoo feels are important. Both search engines don’t value backlinks the same way. For example yahoo places a lot of weight on their directory link much more than google. So you can possibly try adding your site to yahoo directory and see the impact.

3. See if your site has any redirect issues if your site has redirect problems and yahoo’s crawler is unable to pickup then still your site can be in trouble. Make sure to check all possible external links coming into your site for wrong 302 type redirects. If you feel suspicious about a link hurting you contact the webmaster and tell them to remove your link. Google has become very efficient in handling redirects I don’t think yahoo is doing the same way.

4. Add a sitemap and link it to your homepage ( if you don’t already have one ) as well as submit a sitemap to yahoo through yahoo Site Explorer it might show some difference.

5. You can fine your presence felf to yahoo by featuring in their articles, added to their newsletter etc.

6. Make sure your Web hosting company don’t have any problem with yahoo’s crawler sometimes this could a problem where yahoo’s crawler have problem accessing your site because of bad DNS resolving with your hosting company.

7. Make sure you don’t do anything against their guidelines on your site check for yahoo’s search engine guidelines policy

8. If you are an affiliate site you need to be careful, Yahoo don’t enjoy affiliate sites in their index.

9. Yahoo loves content rich sites unique content and not a directory type of site with millions of URLs without any added value to the users.

10. Last but not the least check for potential violations of yahoo’s guidelines on your site which google didn’t detect but yahoo did. Yahoo is more efficient and strict when it comes to some search engine spam make sure its not there on your site. Also check for any potential restrictions in .htaccess or robots.txt or other areas where you might cause problems for yahoo’s crawler.

Good luck
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Yahoo directory submission Is it Worth 299$

Everyone knows yahoo directory charges 299$ for regular site submission for a year and Adult sites it costs 600$. This is huge compared to what other paid directories are charging out there. So is it worth it? I recommend an Yes and a No

YES if your site a well established site and want to improve your yahoo search engine exposure to the maximum
YES if you are looking to spend money on a good paid directory. You can’t find a better paid directory than yahoo out there.
YES if you want google to treat you better, Both Google and Yahoo consider a yahoo directory listing an authority backlink since all sites listed in it are subject to manual review.
YES if get a good category to list your site listing your site 10 levels deep is not the greatest thing to do when submitting to a directory.
YES if you have an adult site and need a quality backlink. I dont think many sites appreciate adult sites other than yahoo directory.
YES if you want yahoo LOVE , they love your site if you pay them 299$

NO if you are a small Mom and Pop business and have limited budget on online business
NO if you have good cheap alternatives for backlinks
NO the sky will not fall and you can always have good rankings even if you dont have a yahoo directory listing.
NO if you don’t want editorial review of your site sometimes if your site is too spammy with too many affiliate links they will ban your site in the main index.

That is all I can think of for now

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Checking backlinks in yahoo similar to google webmaster tools backlinks download

Many asked us whether we have an alternative for Google’s webmaster tools backlink tool where we can see atleast 30 to 40% of the links a site has. From what have seen no you cannot see more than 1000 backlinks in yahoo. Probably if they add a platform like google to validate a site and download backlinks as a CSV in future it will be great. But till now by far the only search engine that is even close to showing something accurate for a site is yahoo. We have not seen any other search engine show as accurate backlinks data as google. There are different methods to check backlinks in yahoo. We had an article written couple of years back based on this. Please read it here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

Yahoo Open search to support Microformats

Yahoo’s Amit mar has mentioned in their official Yahoo search blog that Yahoo will be supporting Microformats in their opensearch

According to yahoo
“By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data. “

So what is Microformat According to wikipedia

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a web-based[1] data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes[2] and attributes.[3] This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.
Although the content of web pages is technically already capable of “automated processing,” and has been since the inception of the web, there are certain limitations. This is because the traditional markup tags used to display information on the web do not describe what the information means.[4] Microformats are intended to bridge this gap by attaching semantics, and thereby obviate other, more complicated methods of automated processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.[4]
Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on. More are being developed. Version 3 of the Firefox browser,[5] as well as version 8 of Internet Explorer[6] are expected to include native support for microformats.

Several microformats have been developed to enable semantic markup of particular types of information.

hAtom – for marking up Atom feeds from within standard HTML
hCalendar – for events
hCard – for contact information; includes:
adr – for postal addresses
geo – for geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude)
hReview – for reviews
hResume – for resumes or CVs
rel-directory – for distributed directory creation and inclusion
rel-nofollow, an attempt to discourage 3rd party content spam (e.g. spam in blogs).
rel-tag – for decentralized tagging (Folksonomy)
xFolk – for tagged links
XHTML Friends Network (XFN) – for social relationships
XOXO – for lists and outlines

[edit] Proposed microformats
Among the many proposed microformats,[9] the following are undergoing active development:

citation – for citing references
currency – for amounts of money
geo extensions – for places on Mars, The Moon, and other such bodies; for altitude; and for collections of waypoints marking routes or boundaries
species – For the names of living things.
measurements – For physical quantities, structured data-values.

[edit] Uses of microformats
Using microformats within HTML code provides additional formatting and semantic data that can be used by applications. These could be applications that collect data about on-line resources, such as web crawlers, or desktop applications such as e-mail clients or scheduling software.

Several browser extensions, such as Operator, provide the ability to detect microformats within an HTML document and export them into formats compatible with contact management and calendar utilities, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft expressed a desire to incorporate Microformats into upcoming projects;[10] as have other software companies.

In Wikipedia – and more generally in MediaWiki – microformats are used as part of templates like {{coord}}.

[edit] Evaluation of microformats
Various commentators have offered review and discussion on the design principles and practical aspects of microformats. Additionally, microformats have been compared to other approaches that seek to serve the same or similar purpose.[11] From time to time, there is criticism of a single, or all, microformats.[11] Documented efforts to advocate both the spread and use of microformats are known to exist as well.[12] [13] Håkon Wium Lie has said we will see “a bunch of microformats being developed, and that’s how the semantic web will be built.” [14]

[edit] Design principles
Computer scientist and entrepreneur, Rohit Khare stated that reduce, reuse, and recycle is “shorthand for several design principles” that motivated the development and practices behind microformats.[8][15] These aspects can be summarized as follows:

Reduce: favor the simplest solutions and focus attention on specific problems;
Reuse: work from experience and favor examples of current practice;
Recycle: encourage modularity and the ability to embed, valid XHTML can be reused in blog posts, RSS feeds, and anywhere else you can access the web.[8]

[edit] Accessibility
Because some microformats make use of title attribute of HTML’s abbr element to conceal machine-readable data (particularly date-times and geographical coordinates) in the “abbr design pattern”, the plain text content of the element is inaccessible to those screenreaders that expand abbreviations.[16]

[edit] Intellectual property
As part of the open participation model of the microformats community to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.

[edit] Alternative approaches
Microformats are not the only solution for providing “more intelligent data” on the web. Alternative approaches exist and are under development as well. For example, the use of XML markup and standards of the semantic web are cited as alternative approaches. [8] Some contrast these with microformats in that they do not necessarily coincide with the design principles of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, at least not to the same extent.[8]

One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches:

“ Here’s a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server. It’s a hassle. (Microformats) lower the barrier to entry.[4] ”

For some applications the use of other approaches may be valid. If one wishes to use microformat-style embedding but the type of data one wishes to embed does not map to an existing microformat, one can use RDFa to embed arbitrary vocabularies into HTML. An example of this would be embedding domain-specific scientific data on the Web like zoological or chemical data, where no microformat for such data exists. Furthermore, standards such as W3C’s GRDDL allow microformats to be converted into data compatible with the Semantic Web.[17]

Another advocate of microformats, Ryan King, put the compatibility of microformats with other approaches this way:

“ Microformats provide an easy way for many people to contribute semantic data to the web. With GRDDL all of that data is made available for RDF Semantic Web tools. Microformats and GRDDL can work together to build a better web. [17]

Microsoft offers more for yahoo – 34$

According to Citigroup Microsoft has offered a share price of 34$ a increase of 3$ per share. Previous offer of Microsoft was 31$ which yahoo and its share holders denied. It seems soon it will be YahSoft or you can say MicroHoo

Yahoo now supports google’s effort on Open social networking

Yahoo we announced today that it has joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages.

According to yahoo press release

“OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.”

This video gives a better understanding on how opensocial works and to find more resources

Self expression and communication are often fun and entertaining alone, but OpenSocial is also a platform that can be leveraged to solve real world tasks where the social graph assists us in making decisions. For example, while some might be prone to grab a book at random off the shelf, there are many who appreciate a good recommendation from a friend. With a variety of possibilities in entertainment and interests, it can be useful to facilitate meetings, purchases, recommendations, information management and learning to create a richer, more lasting experience across your application.