Know About Search Engine – Yahoo

Whenever there is talk about online business or blogging, the first things come to mind that is a website and the next thing is How to do a successful online business? How to get tons of traffic on your website? How to outrank a blog or website in Search Engine?

Whatever things i.e. blog, business or any kind of work on the internet, you are doing online it will ultimately come up in search engines. If anyone searches in the Search engine then your business or blog will come into the picture.

This circle of online businesses revolves around the Search Engine. If the search engine is able to find your website among other tons of websites and various posts then and then only your online business is going to get attention.

Hence, it is imperative to understand the Search Engine. In the previous article, we learned about the Google Search Engine. I am providing a link here for your ready reference.

Here you will understand the Yahoo Search Engine.

Yahoo:

Two students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, both were PhD candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, California, USA founded Yahoo! in 1994.

Yahoo is 2nd prominent search engine with an explicit core search market. Similar to the Google Search Engine, Yahoo is also a crawler–based search engine. Yahoo crawler is software and it is called Yahoo Slurp. Yahoo Slurp works in an almost similar way to Googlebot works.

I think many website developers or bloggers are not aware of it. Due to the similar working of Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp, it is easy to manage our website for both search engines.

1) URL : https://in.yahoo.com
2) Search Engine Type: Crawler-based search engine.
3) Yahoo’s crawler Name: Yahoo Slurp
4) Launched date: March 1, 1995
5) Position among search Engines: 2nd, after Google.

Yahoo Slurp discovers and crawled new websites if they are linked to other indexed websites. Yahoo also allows direct submission of websites. Yahoo Slurp is not as mature as Googlebot Hence, for better indexing and getting tons of traffic on the website you have to know the below steps.

Design and content guideline for indexing on Yahoo Search Engine

a. Site hierarchy: Each desired page to be indexed should be accessible by Yahoo. The hierarchy of the website should be very clear.

b. Ready webpage(s): Do not submit pages that are under construction.

c. Contents of website: Unique and genuine content should be on your website with targeted keywords.

d. Links on the website: The link on the website should be intended to serve the purpose of the people for helping or navigating to find interesting and related information.

e. Title and Meta Description tag: Contents used under Title and Meta tags should accurately describe and should be relevant to the contents of the page. The title and text in the Meta Description tag should be between 25 and 150 and do not use special characters in the description tag.

f. Images: Yahoo cannot understand what images are about; hence use only descriptive names for Image files. Make minimum use of Images and try to use text to describe contents of page.

g. Navigation: Make sure that all desired webpage(s) have navigation with text links at least once to reach them.

h. ALT Tag: Use ALT tag for images to tell search engines that what is image about.

i. Non-friendly Contents: Like other crawlers, crawl Frames, JavaScript, and Flash, cookies may not be properly understood by Yahoo, hence avoid using them or optimize them properly.

j. File size: Recommended HTML-based file size is 150kb.

k. Image format and size: keep it small and simple, high image file size causes page size heavier and slower.

l. URL: URLs of a webpage should be simple and smaller because it is easier to crawl.

Technical advice for indexing on Yahoo Search Engine

A website should be discoverable: Submit your website for the indexing Yahoo; so website will automatically be detected when those linking websites will be crawled.

Submit your website Sitemap: Submit the site map of your website to help it to finds webpage(s) in search engines.

Files and directories: Keep the same types of files and images in the same directories; do not mix them, so that the crawler will be able to find content on your site easily and efficiently.

robot.txt: Which webpage(s) on your website should be or should not be crawled or indexed tells to search engine by robot.txt. So, make proper settings on your website.

Website appearance: Before publishing your post on the website, you should check the website’s appearance. Check that they show your website content correctly on different types of browsers.

Server response: Make sure that the server does not respond with 400, 401 and 500 errors because time-out and servers’ slow response would badly affect the crawling and indexing of your website.

Page load time: Check regularly page loading time. The loading time of the page should be as shorter as possible it should not go over 9 seconds. If the loading time of the page is longer people will not stay on your site and also crawler will not crawl your website pages.

Well-formed HTML Tags: The HTML code you are using is well-formed and all tags are properly placed.

Quality measures for indexing on Yahoo Search Engine

Avoid: Avoid keyword stuffing, do not put the same keyword in your post so many times. (keyword density should not be 3% in the body and 15% to 20% for Meta description tags and in the title tags) and bad neighbours (bad links) and doorway webpage(s).

Frequency of Crawl: The frequency of crawl may depend upon factors like the number of webpages (s). Static websites crawled more frequently than dynamic websites.

Website Links: The website should not link to any unknown malware content. Or unsolicited comments on your page that comment contain malware or robotic virus or bot. Do not link websites with irrelevant links/websites and do not link overly.

Dynamic webpage(s)/URLs considerations

Dynamic URL parameters: Keep parameters short and few in numbers.

Consider rewriting URL: It is always good to remove unnecessary parameters from your dynamic URLs; because it saves crawling time to crawl unnecessary and duplicate webpage(s) and enhances website speed.

Yahoo site explorer also gives features to rewrite URLs to make them search engine friendly.

Static link vs. Dynamic link: Yahoo recommends avoiding dynamically generated links/URLs.

Yahoo’s Useful Tools for SEO

Following are the tools for SEO for the Yahoo Search engine

Yahoo site explorer

Yahoo site explorer provided almost identical features to Google webmaster. This tool allows webmasters to explore all the webpage indexed in the Yahoo search engine.

Yahoo site explorer makes it possible to.

• Submit website.
• Explore indexed webpage.
• Submit Sitemap.
• View the most popular webpage(s).
• View comprehensive Sitemaps.
• Find linking webpage(s) to any popular website.
• Reasons for not indexed page.
• Allows you to add a “Site Explorer Badge” to the website or any specific webpage. This feature allows you to track the “inbound links” count to the website and webpage respectively.
• Add Dynamic URLs
• Delete URLs from Yahoo indexes.
• Authentication to your website allows authorized access to detailed information about the website.

YSlow for Firefox

Yahoo’s YSlow is an Add-On for Firefox that provides functionality to optimize website components, including scripts, images, style sheets, etc. This useful tool is available for free. This add-on is incorporated with the Firebug web development tool.

It extracts the information related to components of your website i.e. size, expired headers, and website is zipped or not.

It grades websites based on some user defines rule sets.

YSlow uses tools to optimize images on websites. It squeezes the last few bytes of the image to optimize performance without affecting the actual image.

It also suggests how many bytes can be removed to save space and improve site speed. It suggests ways to improve site performance.

It provides the following information related to a website

i) It summarizes webpage components.
ii) Display webpage statistics.
iii) It analyzes webpage(s) and explores why they are slow.
iv) Provide useful tools for analyzing performance.

Read More: Know Your Search Engine for successful online Business in 2023