.com Not Listed in Regional Yahoo? Dont Despair!

If you’re a non-American business with a .com web address, and your regional Yahoo ranking is important to you, then my story might interest you.

Recently my copywriting website dropped out of Yahoos Australian rankings. For quite a while, it had been at number 1 for my primary keywords advertising copywriter, copywriter, and website copywriter. But then it suddenly disappeared. I clicked through about 10 pages of results, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then searched for my domain, and Yahoo couldn’t find it.

Something smelt fishy.

I’d done nothing to my site to warrant a ban, and I still had heaps of links to my site (actually, I had more than ever before).

I’m an Australian advertising copywriter. I’m based just north of Sydney and I host my website with a major Australian host. But my web address is a .com, not a .au. I started thinking this might be the problem.

So I emailed Yahoo support, explaining the problem, and sharing my thoughts on the cause.

And all of a sudden, nothing happened.

So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And finally, after about a couple of weeks, I received an email from a Yahoo support representative informing me incorrectly that my keyword wasn’t featured in my page title or description. I should remedy this shortcoming and re-submit my site to Yahoo.

Frustrated, I replied. I repeated the important facts from the first email just to ensure they listened. They hadn’t even searched for my domain to confirm that Yahoo no longer recognised it.

When they got back to me this time, they had started paying a bit more attention. The support rep confirmed my suspicion that Yahoo had excluded my site because of its .com URL. Her very helpful solution was that I should change my domain to .au! She included some ridiculously complex instructions for how to do so, and sent me on my merry way.

As you might expect, I wasn’t satisfied. Nor was I merry. I explained to her that this was not an acceptable solution because all the links to my site on the internet are pointing to the .com and my email address uses the .com.

She was unmoved. She asserted that this was the best and only way to solve the problem. It might help if I added my primary keyword to my title and description.

My laughter was not good humoured! I wrote back expressing my displeasure at this solution. I painstakingly explained how Yahoo had made a mistake, and that if Google was capable of recognising my Australian business despite its .com addresses, I would think it’s technically possible. I also cited several other .coms in the first couple of pages of Australian results.

No response.

The situation didn’t look promising

If this sounds like a familiar story to you, don’t despair. A week or two later, I searched Yahoo Australia for my primary keyword, and surprise, surprise. My site was ranked number 1 again!

The moral to the story? Don’t be intimidated by Yahoo. Trust your instincts and don’t give up. If you’re an Australian business with a .com, and you’re not listed in Australian searches, this might be why. In fact, I would think this story is relevant to all regional Yahoos. (Of course, before making any accusations, it’s a good idea to make sure your site is properly optimised and that you have plenty of inbound links.)

Anyway, thats my story. I hope it helps someone.

And they all lived happily ever after. So far at least

Significance of Metadata

Metadata is important for many reasons

  • Provides a standardized system to classify and label web content.
  • Supports website maintenance and administration.
  • Improves search relevancy.
  • Provides an audit trail (information about who created the information and when it was created).
  • Helps identify redundant, duplicative, and possibly obsolete content.
  • Identifies similar content so you can establish logical links and other relationships.
  • Allows information to be tracked and assembled government-wide.

How Does Link Popularity Work?

Link popularity is the number of hyperlinks pointed to your website. It’s also a lot of times used as term

Here’s an example of how I consider link popularity works:

Let’s say that Sally Pizza Palace Web site has a link to Michael Clothing store. This almost certainly won’t assist Michael link popularity for the keywords “men’s clothing.” However, if both Sally Pizza Palace and Michael Men’s Clothing Store are both situated in the city of Sydney, and people are penetrating for “men’s clothing in Sydney,” the excellence of that link, may have now gone up a small. There’s now a ordinary thread (Sydney) between the sites. It probably won’t help for those people simply probing for men’s clothing, but may help if they’re searching particularly for stores in the City of Sydney. A higher quality link for Michael, though, would be one from “Sam’s Clothing Store Directory,” which lists a whole group of clothing stores that can be found on the Internet. That is precisely the kind of link that the search engines would credit in the direction of link popularity. The key is in having that ordinary thread between the sites.

Link Building that make logic: Who to Link To

When you are engage in building links to enhance your link popularity, who to link to? The query of where to link to enhance ranking can be puzzling. Logical thoughts is needed to attain link popularity in a natural means.

Google Page Rank

First and Primary, Page Rank is part of the algorithm of Google’s positioning in the search engine results. New search engines utilize link popularity in their algorithm to assess your website as well. But Page Rank is only one of the 100 plus criterion Google uses to assess your web pages. Use the thought of Page Rank as a “tool” to assist make decisions, there is no need to exist and die by the results. Link popularity itself is simply one way to progress your ranking.

Should You Link To Them?

Think about it. You see an excellence website; you see high-quality content. The website is a “Mom and Pop” site with little ranking. Thus what if the Google Toolbar says Page Rank 2/10? That 2/10 might one day be 8/10. More prominently, you are linking to it since it is good to link to for your guests.

What is The Google Sandbox Effect?

In the age of fair competition you may find it hard to believe that a search engine may hinder the appearance of a new website. This is what is currently believed to be happening on more web servers today. Some programmers have viewed Google as uncomfortable to rank newer websites until they have proven their viability to exist for more than a period of months. Thus the term Sandbox Effect applies to the idea that all new websites have their ratings placed in a holding tank until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

However the website is not hindered as much as the links that are reciprocated from other users. Newer links that are created are put on a probationary status until again they pickup in rank from other matured sites or placed directly by an ad campaign. The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start obtaining rank from reciprocal or back linking.

Some advice has been given to have companies you are going to reciprocate back add your link first to the website. This may help grandfather your site in, thus reducing the waiting time associated with new websites. People have noticed a 0 page rank when first signing up and receiving a bolstering 7 page ranking after 4 months. Why the delay? The fact is, that if people realized how easy it would be to get a high ranking, would that take away the credibility of the engine. It depends on whom you ask, but it does seem to be happening frequently to newer subscribers. Do not discontinue back linking, your rank will eventually appear.

Importance of Homepage

Having an effective homepage is one of the best practices for managing your website. A homepage serves as the front door of your website. You should design your homepage to feature the public’s most requested information and services and to serve as a top-level directory to access the primary sections of your website.

The homepage is the main tool for sending your visitors in the right direction.

  • Government websites need to focus on helping the public find the services and information they want and need most.
  • Research shows that more than half of all web users evaluate websites based on homepages alone. If you have an ineffective homepage, many visitors will immediately be turned off and may never come back to your site.
  • Web visitors want fast, efficient service. On homepages, they expect to find what they are looking for with little or no scrolling.
  • Web users are impatient. They do not want to be distracted by text or graphics that don’t help them find what they want or that increase download time.
  • Even if your website is targeted to specialized audiences, your homepage needs to communicate basic information to the general public. Citizens as a whole are an audience for federal public websites, funded by taxpayer dollars.

How to get linked without even trying?

Interestingly sufficient, if your site is well written and provides a group of useful information, you won’t have to look for out links at all. Other sites will link to yours of their own wish. We have seen this procedure in action with our Rank Write Roundtable site. Without vigorously requesting any links (other than the major Directories and a few sites that list email newsletters), many extremely relevant sites have added Rank Write to their list of links. Every week, I locate more and more sites that have added our link. This, of course, is the perfect, and isn’t going to occur for every site. However, if done properly, still some commercial sites might be able to benefit from this approach. If the commercial site adds a number of content, and if the content is unique and useful, other sites may desire to link to it. You just need to be original. For instance, Michael’s Men’s Clothing Store could add some pages telling the latest trends in men’s fashion. What’s hot this season and what’s not. If Michael does a good job presenting this in order, and updates it often, other fashion sites might put in a link to Michael’s site, because it adds value to their possess site.

These are the types of things you require to think about when it comes to the link popularity of your site. How can you create your site so good that others will be only too eager to link to it, without you even having to inquire for it? If you can figure that out, you won’t have to worry about link popularity still again!

How does personalization help SEO?

Google is stepping into personalized search results. The growth of personalized search should have an impact on search marketers.

According to Danny Sullivan, anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products:

Search History
Personalized Search
Personalized Homepage

Personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.

Personalization benefits users as their searches can be relevant. This can benefit site owners also because they have excellent content which will be weighted more favorably. Apart form good content, web pages need good title and meta tags play an important role, because these are displayed on the search results page, through which human users will judge whether to visit that particular site or not.

You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to make users visit your site is to have a Google gadget, add to Google button, Google bookmark button so that more users can visit your site. The more a user relies on your site, the better ranking your site will receive.

In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal which sites ae competitive strong or weak compared to the client’s site, regardless of that the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking. In- depth competitor intelligence will tell SEO practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors revealing semantic relationships between client’s content, the competitor’s content, and he semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted.

Managing and Categorizing Content

Organizing and categorizing content is one of the most important steps you can take to ensure your users can easily navigate and search your site. Here are steps to help you do that:

Organize content based on audience needs

  • Have a good homepage
  • Use common content, terminology, and placement
  • Use consistent navigation
  • Don’t duplicate existing content
  • Manage links
  • Apply metadata
  • Avoid putting employee information on your public website

SEO – Planning And Strategy

The majority of all traffic to a website comes from a search engine; the only way you’ll get that traffic is to optimize your site for those search engines. There are many ways to optimize your site, and fortunately, it isn’t hard to do just that. If you’re looking to start a site, the first thing you should do is build your site around search engines.

You already know the reason for your site; the only thing left to do is figure out what keywords you’ll need to get the traffic you desire. The use of “SEO Tools” such as keyword analyzers and rank analyzers, which can be found online, will be of great use to you in building your site. These tools will ensure a correctly optimized website for all search engines.

Each search engine is different; some require a certain amount of “link backs” or clicks to your website from other sites to rank high, while others need targeted keywords. The most used search engine by far is Google, and if you want to rank high in Google, you’ll need “link backs” from known sites.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to obtain the “link backs” you need, though the cheapest and easiest method is to create targeted content unique to your website. Larger websites will have a reason to link to your website if you give them one; creating content relevant to your site is the best way. After you finish creating the site of your dreams and have packed it full of the content and keywords you want the next step is to submit your site to search engines.

Before you submit your website directory to a search engine, you’ll want to make sure you have quality material focused on the keywords you’re targeting. You’ll want to create “Metatag data/descriptions” for each of your web pages, giving the search engines into what your site is about. There are tools you can use to accomplish this and make things much easier for yourself.

So you’ve created the site, built the content and submitted it; so now what? Well, let’s make sure you’ve done the job correctly before quitting. You looked over the available SEO Tools to maximize keyword usage correctly. You’ve built the right content to increase “link backs” from well-known websites. Relevant Meta Tag Descriptions are in place on all web pages you wish to index, and you’ve submitted your site to be crawled by the biggest search engines.

Request a Free SEO Quote