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Optimizing for Yahoo!
Back in the dawn of the Internet, Yahoo! was the most
popular search engine. When Google arrived, its indisputably
precise search results made it the preferred search engine.
However, Google is not the only search engine and it is
estimated that about 20-25% or searches are conducted on
Yahoo! Another major player on the market is MSN, which
means that SEO professionals cannot afford to optimize only
for Google but need to take into account the specifics of
the other two engines (Yahoo! and MSN) as well.
Optimizing for three search engines at the same time is not
an easy task. There were times, when the SEO community was
inclined to think that the algorith m of Yahoo! was on
deliberately just the opposite to the Google algorithm
because pages that ranked high in Google did not do so well
in Yahoo! and vice versa. The attempt to optimize a site to
appeal to both search engines usually lead to being kicked
out of the top of both of them.
Although there is no doubt that the algorithms of the two
search engines are different, since both are constantly
changing, none of them is made publicly available by its
authors and the details about how each of the algorithms
function are obtained by speculation based on probe-trial
tests for particular keywords, it is not possible to say for
certain what exactly is different. What is more, having in
mind the frequency with which algorithms are changed, it is
not possible to react to every slight change, even if
algorithms' details were known officially. But knowing some
basic differences between the two does help to get better
ranking. A nice visual representation of the differences in
positioning between Yahoo! and Google gives the Yahoo vs
Google tool.
The Yahoo! Algorithm - Differences With Google
Like all search engines, Yahoo! too spiders the pages on the
Web, indexes them in its database and later performs various
mathematical operations to produce the pages with the search
results. Yahoo! Slurp (the Yahoo! spiderbot) is the the
second most active spider crawler on the Web. Yahoo! Slurp
is not different from the other bots and if your page misses
important elements of the SEO mix that make it not
spiderable, then it hardly makes a difference which
algorithm will be used because you will never get to a top
position. (You may want to try the Search Engine Spider
Simulator and check what of your pages is spiderable).
Yahoo! Slurp might be even more active than Googlebot
because occasionally there are more pages in the Yahoo!
index than in Google. Another alleged difference between
Yahoo! and Google is the sandbox (putting the sites “on
hold” for some time till they appear in search results).
Google's sandbox is deeper, so if you have made recent
changes to your site, you might have to wait a month or two
(shorter for Yahoo! and longer for Google) till these
changes are reflected in the search results.
With new major changes in the Google algorithm under way
(the so-called “BigDaddy” Infrastructure expected to be
fully launched in March-April 2006) it's hard to tell if the
same SEO tactics will be hot on Google in two months' time.
One of the supposed changes is the decrease in weight of
links. If this happens, a major difference between Yahoo!
and Google will be eliminated because as of today Google
places more importance on factors such as backlinks, while
Yahoo! sticks more to onpage factors, like keyword density
in the title, the URL, and the headings.
Of all the differences between Yahoo! and Google, the way
keywords in the title and in the URL are treated is the most
important. If you have the keyword in these two places, then
you can expect a top 10 place in Yahoo!. But beware – a
title and an URL cannot be unlimited and technically you can
place no more than 3 or 4 keywords there. Also, it matters
if the keyword in the title and in the URL is in a basic
form or if it is a derivative – e.g. when searching for
“cat”, URLs with “catwalk” will also be displayed in Yahoo!
but most likely in the second 100 results, while URLs with
“cat” only are quite near to the top.
Since Yahoo! is first a directory for submissions and then a
search engine (with Google it's just the opposite), a site,
which has the keyword in the category it is listed under,
stands a better chance to be in the beginning of the search
results. With Google this is not that important. For Yahoo!
keywords in filenames also score well, while for Google this
is not a factor of exceptional importance.
But the major difference is keyword density. The higher the
density, the higher the positioning with Yahoo! But beware –
some of the keyword-rich sites on Yahoo! can with no
difficulty fall into the keyword-stuffed category for
Google, so if you attempt to score well on Yahoo! (with
keyword density above 7-8%), you risk to be banned by
Google!
Yahoo! WebRank
Following Google's example, Yahoo! introduced a Web toolbar
that collects anonymous statistics about which sites users
browse, thus way getting an aggregated value (from 0 to 10)
of how popular a given site is. The higher the value, the
more popular a site is and the more valuable the backlinks
from it are.
Although WebRank and positioning in the search results are
not directly correlated, there is a dependency between them
– sites with high WebRank tend to position higher than
comparable sites with lower WebRank and the WebRanks of the
top 20-30 results for a given keyword are most often above
5.00 on average.
The practical value of WebRank as a measure of success is
often discussed in SEO communities and the general opinion
is that this is not the most relevant metrics. However, one
of the benefits of WebRank is that it alerts Yahoo! Slurp
that a new page has appeared, thus inviting it to spider it,
if it is not already in the Yahoo! Search index.
When Yahoo! toolbar was launched in 2004, it had an icon
that showed the WebRank of the page that is currently open
in the browser. Later this feature has been removed but
still there are tools on the Web that allow to check the
WebRank of a particular page. For instance, this tool allows
to check the WebRanks of a whole bunch of pages at a time.
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