Ranking in First page in google not in top 1000 in yahoo – yahoo banned

I know many of you wondered why they don’t rank anywhere in yahoo but are in top 10 in Google results. Most of the time yahoo’s ranking criteria is same as google’s but there are somethings which will prevent your site from ranking in yahoo

Here is a simple checklist criteria that you need to make sure for your no rankings problems with yahoo:

1. Make sure your site is not penalized or banned by yahoo, Yahoo is very good at doing this they are more tougher than google when it comes to penalty. Check whether your site gets indexed in yahoo make sure your pages are there. If you just see your homepage and not your inner pages then its still a problem. If you feel that your site is banned or penalized file for a reinclusion into yahoo. We do offer a reinclusion services in our company for Google, yahoo and MSN. We don’t have any tie up with any search engine but we will make sure we follow all their guidelines clean up every single possible mess with the site and submit it to the for a reconsideration request. Have a banned site in yahoo or feel its banned feel free to contact us through our contact form and please explain what you did or doing on your site,

2. Remember to have backlinks from sites which yahoo feels are important. Both search engines don’t value backlinks the same way. For example yahoo places a lot of weight on their directory link much more than google. So you can possibly try adding your site to yahoo directory and see the impact.

3. See if your site has any redirect issues if your site has redirect problems and yahoo’s crawler is unable to pickup then still your site can be in trouble. Make sure to check all possible external links coming into your site for wrong 302 type redirects. If you feel suspicious about a link hurting you contact the webmaster and tell them to remove your link. Google has become very efficient in handling redirects I don’t think yahoo is doing the same way.

4. Add a sitemap and link it to your homepage ( if you don’t already have one ) as well as submit a sitemap to yahoo through yahoo Site Explorer it might show some difference.

5. You can fine your presence felf to yahoo by featuring in their articles, added to their newsletter etc.

6. Make sure your Web hosting company don’t have any problem with yahoo’s crawler sometimes this could a problem where yahoo’s crawler have problem accessing your site because of bad DNS resolving with your hosting company.

7. Make sure you don’t do anything against their guidelines on your site check for yahoo’s search engine guidelines policy

8. If you are an affiliate site you need to be careful, Yahoo don’t enjoy affiliate sites in their index.

9. Yahoo loves content rich sites unique content and not a directory type of site with millions of URLs without any added value to the users.

10. Last but not the least check for potential violations of yahoo’s guidelines on your site which google didn’t detect but yahoo did. Yahoo is more efficient and strict when it comes to some search engine spam make sure its not there on your site. Also check for any potential restrictions in .htaccess or robots.txt or other areas where you might cause problems for yahoo’s crawler.

Good luck
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Yahoo directory submission Is it Worth 299$

Everyone knows yahoo directory charges 299$ for regular site submission for a year and Adult sites it costs 600$. This is huge compared to what other paid directories are charging out there. So is it worth it? I recommend an Yes and a No

YES if your site a well established site and want to improve your yahoo search engine exposure to the maximum
YES if you are looking to spend money on a good paid directory. You can’t find a better paid directory than yahoo out there.
YES if you want google to treat you better, Both Google and Yahoo consider a yahoo directory listing an authority backlink since all sites listed in it are subject to manual review.
YES if get a good category to list your site listing your site 10 levels deep is not the greatest thing to do when submitting to a directory.
YES if you have an adult site and need a quality backlink. I dont think many sites appreciate adult sites other than yahoo directory.
YES if you want yahoo LOVE , they love your site if you pay them 299$

NO if you are a small Mom and Pop business and have limited budget on online business
NO if you have good cheap alternatives for backlinks
NO the sky will not fall and you can always have good rankings even if you dont have a yahoo directory listing.
NO if you don’t want editorial review of your site sometimes if your site is too spammy with too many affiliate links they will ban your site in the main index.

That is all I can think of for now

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Checking backlinks in yahoo similar to google webmaster tools backlinks download

Many asked us whether we have an alternative for Google’s webmaster tools backlink tool where we can see atleast 30 to 40% of the links a site has. From what have seen no you cannot see more than 1000 backlinks in yahoo. Probably if they add a platform like google to validate a site and download backlinks as a CSV in future it will be great. But till now by far the only search engine that is even close to showing something accurate for a site is yahoo. We have not seen any other search engine show as accurate backlinks data as google. There are different methods to check backlinks in yahoo. We had an article written couple of years back based on this. Please read it here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

Open Warning to content thiefs and copyright violators

MSN Crawler improved crawling activity on our website – MSN search engine crawler

Recently MSN Live Search crawler bot is hitting us hard its most probably because we are working hard on unique contents on our site, as well as the tools, blogs etc. We are getting lot of new natural backlinks and this could be an important reason we are seeing increased crawler activity from all the crawlers.
Also our SEO forum has started to pick up we have seen some new posters become regular in our forum they have posted some interesting postings. Also we have started 5 new blogs A web design blog, PPC blog, Link building blog, Programming blog, personal company blog etc.
Also we have a new search engine experts directory where listing your site is for totally free even you can include your phone numbers and email IDs. Only adding active URLs are chargeable its just launched with about 60 profiles are existing search engine experts.
Our Chief technical Officer who goes by the name Tara has started a blog on our own and she will be sharing her personal thoughts from tomorrow,
Also we are launching our newsletter from this month and we are accepting subscriptions from tomorrow, there are ton of new things coming to our website. This is just an effort to catch up to our competitors.

Keep visiting our site to see great new innovative things coming up,
Good day

Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Searching US specific results from other countries –

US results in other countries:

I know many of you have this question especially webmasters and siteowners from other countries doing business with US clients. For us though we have a sales office in CA, US our development team works from india but our 100% our client base is US. We need to target US customers only and for this we need to make sure have best results in US search engines.

Even if you search google.com from here you won’t have the best results delivered there will be some geotargeting jumping in based on your IP. So to tackle that we need to find other ways. I can list few of the ways we know of and which we use internally use to check our sites as well as our client sites from US pages.

1. Adding &gl=us to the URL works sometimes. But even if you add this if your IP of your internet service provider is country specific then the result still wont be as accurate as it is served in the US states. SO this will kind of work and worth the try.

2. Using the Google adwords https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool this too works sometimes but it delivers results the same way as the above option it also detects the IP and doesnt give the best results and results are not always similar to the US results.

3. A VPN with US Ip works better we have some VPN connects with some client’s offices and we get US Ip where we browse to get exact US based results.

4. Last but not the least the best option infact the option we most use is a US proxy. There are some very good US proxies like

http://www.megaproxy.com/
http://www.hidemyass.com/
http://www.clickgo.info/
http://www.fastwebproxy.net/ etc
They are mostly US proxies and what they see in US is what you see in your country. I recommend using one of those proxies to check results in US,

Google friends can sell paid anchor text links on their sites

When we listened to the live webmaster central live chat which happened on friday they were so tough on sites that are selling links. Also they have a link in webmaster tools to report paid links. Plus they have a good written explanation here.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

According to that document:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt fileGoogle works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.”

Infact they did mention in their LIVE chat that sites which sell links will be penalized. Ok now when we go to the official google blog here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ we can see that few of the sites listed here do sell lot of text based links on their site. Though they nofollow those links I feel linking to those sites means they support those sites.
So can we assume that google’s friends can sell links. I don’t want to rant and I can understand they don’t have control over it but still they link to sites which sell links and this is like endorsing those site’s Search Engine Spamming efforts. So I feel best way to sell links on your site is to go to Search Conferences make friends with Google Employees and sell links safely on our sites with Google’s direct approval.

Bad hosting companies bad for SEO – Web hosting companies

We get questions from users asking whether where we host our website plays a role in search engines. Our answer is yes there are lot of factors when it comes to ranking in search engines and a problem with a hosting company will be an other important factor.
Here are some reasons why you should select a good host.

1. Downtime: Make sure you get the best uptime not just by guarantee but by testimonials of other companies of the hosting company you want to host. We have seen most of the web hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime but a lot of them never keep up that promise. If the site goes down you have to keep going behind them and finally if there is a major fault you site might takes about 3 or 4 days which is a massive negative effect on your site. A long downtime affects your repeated customers if they are regular to your website and find you site is down for a long period eventually they will never return back which is not good for sites which depends on repeated traffic. A long downtime also affects search engine crawling googlebot and other major crawlers are programmed to visit big high quality sites on a repeated trip which varies from inbetween few hours a day to once a day to once in couple of days. If the Search engine crawlers cant crawl the site even after repeated attempts they might boot your site out of index for a short while eventually it will come back but the risk of loosing precious ranking is not good.
Also its not about repeated visitors also first time visitors will be badly affected if you have a bad hosting company and suffer a long term downtime impact in search engines. Imagine potential customers click on a search result and see that your site doesn’t exist they will never come to your again.
Bad DNS resolving: I have seem some hosting companies suffer from bad DNS resolving. If the DNS resolving is not good search engine crawlers will have trouble accessing your site from some of their datacenters and a bad crawl will affect your site. A bad crawl is bad for SEO since your site should have good credible crawling capabilities for the crawlers to visit regularly and inaccessible pages on your site due to DNS problem will result in bad distribution of link juice which will cause loss of internal link popularity.
Banned IPs hosting: There are millions websites which share hosting on same Ips with other websites. Though this is a natural phenomenon sharing an IPs with too much banned websites / spam websites / adult websites will hurt your site. There is a limit no-one can prevent a bad site from being in a shared IP but imagine 60% of all websites hosted on your IP are spamming the search engines then your site will be considered part of it and this will loose your credibility with search engine algorithms.

Shared IPs: As mentioned in the above post shared Ips sometimes hurt best solution is dedicated IP but if you cant afford dedicated Ips research more on the host an if their shared IPs are fine go ahead and host.

Hosting company Search engine rankings: If you are search engine user and looking for a web host mostly you will use search. Most of the time sites that rank in top will have good credibility since they should have worked really hard to reach what they are right now.

Mod_rewrite: Though rewriting is not important now a rewrite to the dynamic URls will make search engines job easier and your users will remember URLs better. I recommend check your host first to make sure they offer good URL writing whether its PHP, or Perl or ASP

There are other factors too but above are important and can be researched before buying with a hosting company,

Google Made us turn off our lights – Earth Hour 2008

We never heard or know anything about Earth hour unless we noticed the Homepage of google. When we saw the new darkend homepage and followed the link from it we were able to understand the importance of spending time with nature for atleast an hour. Yesterday we had some employees working even due to weekend and we turned off all the lights including Air conditioners to make sure we support a good cause.
We all know google always support good causes. Global warming is threatening the very existence for the world we live in and its important everyone realizes how important its to reduce the pollution we inflict on Mother nature so that it doesn’t backfire us through Climate changes and Global warming.
We thank Google wholeheartedly for helping us understand a good cause.

Google Webmaster Central Live chat – Full Raw chat log – Chat log on SEO related discussion

Google webmaster central live chat log full unedited version.
Please read the log here,
Update Full Raw Unedited version of Audio transcript.
We are now posting the full chat log which we were able to save during the live chat conversation between Google’s Search quality / webmaster central engineers and webmasters around the world. It was very interesting session and this is the first time in the history of Search engines did we see live online chat between a search engine company and the webmasters.

This is a raw chat log we never had time to clean it due to weekend. In the coming week we will able to select the best answers from this and will be posting in a separate blog posting till that time enjoy reading this log its interesting. We have some very good industry experts comment in this LOG apart from Google’s panelists.
Already we posted the full text based Question and Answer Session here
Please read the log here.
We are preparing the transcript from the 90 minutes audio its gonna take time, we will also post the full audio though its not of the best quality. 🙂