YahooSlurp and GoogleBot

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? They're sure to be the big buzz now.)

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

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 > (retirar os espaços) 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 in light of the Yahoo Directory Debate, where webmasters and SEOs argued about the value of paying to be in the directory. Thanks Jim (of Stepforth, Inc)!

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

Analysis Of Yahoo's New Algorithm

In an article from eWeek that he published in his blog, Andy Beal said that 15 people from his company spent the majority of Tuesday analyzing Yahoo's results.

Beal noted that the results on Yahoo's search were slightly different from other sites that use Inktomi - do some searches yourself to determine Yahoo's distinct algorithmic flavor.

Chris Sherman, of Search EngineWatch said, "for popular or common queries, there seemed to be very little difference between the two engines in top few results. But once you get past those, the results tend to diverge dramatically."

Beal thought that, "it looks like Yahoo is trying to mimic Google in many ways."

However, Sherman said, "while Yahoo and Google are likely using similar algorithms, one reason for the differences in what's displayed is that Yahoo's email and search teams are now working together to leverage what they've learned about spam.

"Since Yahoo mail processes billions of email messages, this knowledge is likely quite helpful in providing Yahoo with a much deeper understanding of the characteristics of spam -- and helping keep the nasty stuff out of the web page index."

What do you think of the new Yahoo algorithm?

Tell us here!

Search EngineWatch article on the new Yahoo.
eWeek article on the new Yahoo.
The Yahoo press release.

Enjoy!

Garrett French + The WebProNews Team

Keywords: algorithmic search technology, attention attraction

Inktomi. Available from < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inktomi >. access on 15 October 2019.

-- GregorioIvanoff - 23 Sep 2011
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