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Yahoo/Yahoo Slurp/Yahoo Sitematch Information

Brief Introduction to yahoo search engine, their crawler, their PFI/PPC program Sitematch

Yahoo Search Engine

The new Yahoo! Search offers these services and tools to help you find whatever you're looking for, faster and easier than ever.

Yahoo offers the following different types of searches:

Web Search:
Yahoo uses a powerful search algorithm powered by its crawler, Yahoo Slurp, to list webpages related to keywords entered by the user.

News Search:
This section is used to search for news stories, pictures, and audio/video.

Image Search:
The Yahoo image search is used find photos and illustrations from all over the Web. It lists images by crawling the image src tag and lists them.

Directory Search:
It lists webpages from the yahoo directory, related to keywords entered by the user

Yellow Pages Search:
It is used to search for local businesses serving a particular area.

Product Search:
This search is used to find product reviews and prices on the web.

Search Tips
• Try to use specific words rather than general words. For example: If you are searching for the history of books, use “history of books” rather than “books”.
• Avoid using words with more than one meaning.
• For including and excluding words, use + and -.
• You can also use logical words like OR, AND.
• To search for an exact prase, include quotation marks.

Search Meta Words
Here is a list of special keywords that give you results unique to that special keyword instruction. You can enter these Meta words directly into the Yahoo! Search box.

• site: this allows one to find all documents within a particular domain and all it's subdomains.
Example: site:searchenginegenie.com
• hostname: this allows one to find all documents from a particular host only.
Example: hostname:autos.yahoo.com
• link: this allows one to find documents that link to a particular url.
Example: link:http://www. searchenginegenie.com/
• url: this alllows one to find a specific document in yahoo’s index.
Example: url:http://www. searchenginegenie.com/links.html
• inurl: this allows one to find a specific keyword as part of indexed urls.
Example: inurl:bulgarian
• intitle: this allows one to find a specific keyword as part of the indexed titles.
Example: intitle:Bulgarian

Yahoo purchased Overture (the leading Pay Per Click provider) in the middle of 2003. By purchasing Overture, Yahoo now owns AltaVista and AllTheWeb (which were purchased by Overture earlier in the same year). By February 2004, Yahoo stopped showing Google results on their SERPs( Search Engine Result Pages) and started using results based on their own database. The search results were now powered not only by Yahoo’s algorithm, but also by technologies from AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi.

Yahoo! Webrank

According to Yahoo, "Yahoo! Web Rank" is a measure of how popular a web page is based on the number of links pointing at it.

When you enable the Web Rank button on the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, the URLs you visit will be sent to Yahoo! in order to get its Web Rank (from 1 to 10). The info sent about the URL is anonymous and DOES NOT include your Yahoo! ID or any personally identifiable information.

According to me, It is not like Google Pagerank in any way, Though Yahoo says it takes links into count I feel it is not the case, They mostly check the popularity of the site from people using their toolbar and use that data to assign a webrank to it, This is another good feature of yahoo to get into a direct competition with the Big G, Google is our words,

You can turn off Web Rank at any time from the Toolbar Settings menu (pencil icon). When disabled, URLs are no longer sent to Yahoo!.

SO how does Web rank feature work?

The Yahoo! Web Rank feature of the Yahoo! toolbar works by collecting anonymous URL data about the page you are visiting. This anonymous URL data is sent to the Yahoo! Companion servers, and a Yahoo! Web Rank value( which yahoo knows already) is returned to the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar as one measurement of the link popularity of the Web page or URL you are visiting.
You will see a small icon on your Yahoo! Companion Toolbar displaying the Web Rank value (on a scale of 1 to 10) of the site you are currently visiting. Web rank is measured by the link popularity of the web page, Mostly i feel Yahoo gives a lot of weight to sites in Dmoz and yahoo directory, According to them Dmoz is an expert hub and links from it is credited a lot, We have a site with about 500 backlinks in Yahoo showing a Yahoo webrank of 0, ANother sites has only 20 links but one link is from an important category in Dmoz directory that site has a Yahoo web rank of 4 which is really surprising,

Also the big bug I saw in the web rank feature of Yahoo is the webrank of Google, Google has one of the most powerful backlink on the web but Yahoo says Google's Webrank was 0, Which is a Bug in their system, But later it was rectified and now it shows a webrank 10 for yahoo which is a good sign, May be Future is good for Yahoo's Webrank feature but right now it is not too much of an SEO attraction,

How do I install the Yahoo! Web Rank feature?

First you have to download the Yahoo companion toolbar from Yahoo, When that toolbar is downloaded you have to install the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, then you will have the option of enabling the Web Rank feature. If you would like to use it, choose the "Install WITH Web Rank" button on the configuration page and the Yahoo! Web Rank feature will be enabled during the installation of the toolbar.

Important feature of Yahoo webrank is helps in alerting the Yahoo! Search crawler to the existence of a particular Web site or Web page, and direct a crawler to visit that Web site or Web page for inclusion in Yahoo! Search if it is not already in the Yahoo! Search index. This is an important feature and helps you in possible inclusion in the yahoo index, Yahoo crawler is the 2nd most active crawler on the web and I feel you will have a good faith that Yahoo slurp is triggered by this webrank feature.

Yahoo Slurp

Yahoo! Slurp is Yahoo!'s web-indexing robot. The Yahoo! Slurp crawler collects documents from the Web to build a searchable index for search services using the Yahoo! search engine. These documents are discovered and crawled because other web pages contain links directing to these documents.
As part of the crawling effort, the Yahoo! Slurp crawler will take robots.txt standards into account to ensure we do not crawl and index those pages that you would not like to have returned via Yahoo! Search Technology. If a page is disallowed to be crawled by robots.txt standards, it is neither considered for inclusion nor placed in the search engine's database.
Yahoo! Slurp follows HREF links. It does not follow SRC links. This means that Yahoo! Slurp does not retrieve or index individual frames referred to by SRC links.
Yahoo! Slurp has support for frames and makes an effort to crawl complex URLs such as those generated by forms, content generation systems, and dynamic page generation software.

How can I prevent Yahoo Slurp from following links from a particular page or archiving a copy of a page?

Yahoo! Slurp obeys the noindex meta-tag. If you place:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">
-in the head of your web document, Yahoo! Slurp will retrieve the document, but it will not index the document or place it in the search engine's database.

Yahoo Slurp indexes not only the title and meta tags, but also the full text of webpages. So including quality content in the webpage is as important as including keywords in the title and meta tags.
Yahoo searches for pages and when it finds a page with the required keyword, it lists the page in its SERPs. The position of the page depends on the content. But there are chances for a page with the required keyword being left out due to poor content or because Yahoo could not find the page.

How to attract Yahoo slurp to crawl the site ?

There are 3 ways you attract the Yahoo Crawler in crawling the site:

1. Get links from sites that are regularly crawled by the Yahoo Robot, If that is done Yahoo regular visits the site and crawls it, Regular Yahoo visit is a good sign and helps a lot of getting good Ranking,

2. As yahoo says you can trigger the Yahoo Robot by browsing a site using the Yahoo companion toolbar, Yahoo says this will trigger the Yahoo slurp Bot,

3. Through the Infamous PFI/PPC program sitematch, This type of inclusion guarantee's an inclusion into the Yahoo index, so no problem using it,

What is Site Match?

Sitematch is Yahoo's Infamous new PFI/PPC program, This is their major effort to make the site owners bankcrupt through their PFI and PPC for a site, This is particularly for customers who fear they may be left out of Yahoo’s SERPs, Overture launched the Site Match product in March 2004. The Site Match service is the assured way of listing a webpage. But it does not guarantee a good page position.

Working of Site Match
To use the Site Match product, the customer has to sign up by paying an annual fee for quality review of submitted pages. Once reviewed and accepted into the program, the URLs are included in the index that powers search results for Site Match partner sites such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, AlltheWeb and others, providing access to over 75 percent of active Internet users. When Internet users visit the Site Match partner sites and enter keyword searches, the listings will appear within the search results based on their relevance to the user's search request. When a user clicks on a Site Match listing in search results, the page owner has to pay a cost-per-click fee for that lead. The URLs are refreshed (re-crawled) every 48 hours to ensure that the most up-to-date content is available to search users. At end of one year, the annual subscription renews.

Site Match Pricing
When you initiate your Site Match subscription, a non-refundable annual review fee is charged per domain, per URL for setting up your account and for quality review of your pages.
Once your pages are accepted into the program, a cost-per-click fee is charged for each lead driven to your site.

Distinctions between Site Match and Pay-for-Performance

Benefits
• It is a fast and easy submission process The web pages appear on leading search engines such as MSN, HotBot, Overture, About.com, and Excite within 72 hours of joining.
• By submitting to Site Match, the web pages are included into a database that powers search results for multiple engines and portals, including Yahoo!, AltaVista, AlltheWeb and others
• No need to resubmit. Inktomi will re-crawl your subscribed web pages every 48 hours, reflecting any changes you make to your web pages very quickly. The impact from any changes can be seen within days rather than months
• A quality review process that provides search users with highly relevant results, as well as additional targeted leads to the Web sites approved for inclusion in the database Thus it requires less account management and saves your time.
• High return on investment (ROI) with a low annual subscription fee and cost-per-click pricing model
• A dedicated account representative and convenient XML feed for advertisers submitting 1,000 or more Web pages
• Your web page submission guarantees that subscribed pages are in the Inktomi database for 12 months.
• Detailed Click-Thru and Keyword Reports updated every 24 hours. You'll receive fresh data about how many clicks your pages are receiving, what keywords people are finding you for, and how your pages are ranking. Use this detailed reporting information to improve your pages and optimize program performance
• More exposure for your site - reach more than 75% of active internet users.

Disadvantages
1. A paid inclusion is treated similar to a non-paid listing. The difference is that a paid inclusion is guaranteed a listing. But it is not guaranteed a rank. If your page is not relevant, the page may end up being listed on, say, the hundredth page. So paying doesn’t help in such a case.
2. The price for adding URLs is definitely high. As if the annual subscription is not enough, one has to pay for every click.
3. Once the subscription is over, chances are that your ranking may drop.

Conclusion

Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1

Lets assume that a site gets 5k visitors p0er day on a variety of search terms. It converts around 1.5 % of its visitors with a typical sale earning around $10.

1000 extra yahoo visitors would cost $300 (1000 x .30 cents).

On these figures, this site would make 15 sales on these 1000 visits.

15 sales = $150 making a net loss of $150 per 1000 yahoo visitors.

Scenario 2

Lets assume that a site gets 5k visitors per day on a variety of search terms. It converts around 2 % of its visitors with a typical sale earning around $50.

1000 extra yahoo visitors would cost $300 (1000 x .30 cents).

On these figures, this site would make 20 sales on these 1000 visits.

20 sales = $1000 making a net profit of $700 per 1000 yahoo visitors.

The conclusion is pretty simple. If you belong to the second scenario, then the Site Match program is definitely going to boost your profit. But if you belong to the first case, them Site Match is not for you.

Thus it offers a very good services and tools to help your needs faster and easier than ever.

For more information on Search Engine Genie’s services, contact us at webpromotions@gmail.com