Yahoo Update reporting late,

Yahoo Made a major update to their algorithm first week of this month. We saw some of our client sites slightly affected by this update. But the damage was very small we got more SEO benefit than loosing rankings.

Yahoo’s official update on the report

“Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
We’re in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. To share your thoughts on this with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.
Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.”

Does google and yahoo regional search engines use different algorithm than the primary .com search engines. seo blog tip of the day dec 8th 2007

Does google and yahoo regional search engines use different algorithm than the primary .com search engines.
Answer to this is ofcourse yes. All geotargeting search engines needs to operate on a different algorithm than the .com ones to identify potential regional links and regional domains. Various factors affect geotargeted rankings.
Domains hosted, backlinks, domain name itself, visitor tracking, trust network in geotargeted domains, topical directories etc.
So if you want to rank for regional domains be prepared to do something different don’t use same .com and .regional extension domains for 2 different rankings.

How to Rank in yahoo’s regional search engine? – SEO tip Dec 2nd 2007

We got a following question from a customer?

How to get into yahoo’s regional search engine?

For example how to get your site ranked in yahoo canada if your site is canada based.

1. Make sure the site is hosted in canada.

2. If the domain is .ca its a big advantage its like telling the search engine directly that the site is a canada site.

3. Get as much links from sites that are hosted in canada

4. Get as much links from sites that link to sites that get links from other sites hosted in canada

5. Have a the copy of the pages as much relevant to the canada and its regions as much as possible.

Is yahoo slurp misbehaving?

Complaints
Webmasters complain that yahoo slurp is not tripping the filter given in robots.txt for the following

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Yahoo slurp obeys the agent specific rule and hence does not crawl the directories /bloop/ and /blop/directories where as it crawled the directories in the generic rule.

Discussions and Suggestions

Webmasters figured out that not only yahoo but even other search engines behaved in the same manner.

All the SE BOTS and slurps do not obey the Generic rule.

Suggestion 1: Put the wildcard ones first that has generic rule to less specific bots and then place the agent specific code.

Suggestion 2: main theme behind this is that the major bots get to their corresponding user agents and the rest carry on with wild card user agents.

Conclusion

All bots do trip and filter the specifications. They are tripped by the server configuration.
The fact is that major bots and slurps get to their respective user agents and the rest continue with the generic rule.

The exact rule for the above case would be

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

This can be shortened to

User-agent: Slurp
User-agent: msnbot
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

Yahoo search cache server not working, – half the time it doesnt work at all,

Yahoo’s search cache doesn’t work, Most of the time it doesnt work it is the same case now, When ever I try clicking on cache for various searches it gives the following message

“We’re sorry, but we could not process your request for the cache of ******************. Please click here to check the current page or check for previous versions at the Internet Archive.”

Yahoo has a blog bot – Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 – Is yahoo planning to introduce blog search,

Recently we had a crawl from Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 bot, they were searching for our xml feed, think this is new yahoo seem to be planning to start something similar to blogsearch.google.com ( google’s blog search )

This is what yahoo says about their bot

“Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 is Yahoo!’s blog indexing robot. As part of the crawling effort, Yahoo!’s blog crawler will take robots.txt standards into account to ensure we do not crawl and index content from those pages whose content you do not want included in Yahoo! Search Technology. If a page is disallowed to be crawled by robots.txt standards, Yahoo! will not read or use the contents of that page. The URL of a protected page may be included in Yahoo! Search Technology as a “thin” document with no text content. Links and reference text from other public web pages provide identifiable information about a URL and may be indexed as part of web search coverage.

help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-02.html

Can google adsense and yahoo publisher network ads be published on same page,

Everybody who runs contextual ads on their site will have a doubt whether to publish adsense and YPN on same site / page,

Adsense advisor says adsense and YPN can be published on same site but not on same page,

this is what he said in webmasterworld.com

“YPN ads fall are considered competitive ads, as any other contextually targeted ads, or ads that mimic Google ads in appearance. For a more detailed description, see our policies page (http://google.com/adsense/) ‘Competitive ads and services’.
While you can use both AdSense and YPN on the same site, our program policies prohibit publishers from using them on the same page. “

Yahoo update – yahoo updates its search index on 23rd january

Webmasterworld.com guys report yahoo update webmasterworld.com/forum35/3814.htm

check your rankings with our yahoo rank checker

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/yahoo-rank-checker.html

askjeeves releases cache dates – when will MSN and Yahoo add cache dates to their cache,

Search Engine Watch blog reports ask jeeves adding cache dates to sites cache in their results, This is a bold improvement, Yahoo and MSN still didnt bring this facility, Hope they will follow soon,

Google is the first search engine to introduce option,

Yahoo site explorer – A nice friend for SEO companies,

Yahoo site explorer is a tool which helps to search a sites backlinks, pages links in yahoo search etc, It gives the data in a more simple form than the normal search, Also it is very quick and is very helpful for major research,

The export feature of yahoo’s site explorer is very helpful in search engine optimization, you can do a linkdomain: search and just export all the data to an excel sheet,

Yahoo’s approach is just opposite to google’s approach,

Google just don’t show proper backlinks for a site, Also their arrangement of site: search is not logical a tall, apart from homepage they don’t arrange all other pages properly,

Yahoo site: arrangement is more logical, it is based on the quality of each and every page listed algorithmically,

Hope continues this great service for a longer time,