The Crazy Mind » yahoo

Yahoo introduces “robots-nocontent” tag

Ravi — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:53:29 +0000

With the Robots no-content tag, Webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which will indicate to Yahoo slurp to recognize what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. TThis means that the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a “nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results.

Example:

div class=”robots-nocontent”

This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site

span class=”robots-nocontent”

This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page

p class=”robots-nocontent”

This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site

div class=”robots-nocontent”

This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents

Basing on the updates on many websites, Yahoo will soon update its index for this new change and you will be able to see a shuffle in the ranking of the websites.

The ‘robots-nocontent‘ tag does not in any way affect how links are treated. All links will continue to be used to find targets and will carry attribution to the target if they do not have the ‘rel=nofollow‘ tag on them, whether or not they are inside a ‘robots-nocontent‘ section.

Yahoo’s site Indexing filters

Ravi — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 05:41:23 +0000

Why does Yahoo index only few pages of the site despite it being a popular site that does well in all other search engines?

For Yahoo this is the typical sign of a ban. Go over everything on the site. Pay special attention to any linking that might appear to be the least bit dubious; Y! (and historically Inktomi) has always been quicker to pull the trigger on this issue.

Generally sites tend to be removed the ‘most’ from what I have seen and experienced due to linking, whether it be interlinking sites on the same network, extensive and reciprocal linking between pages, and even linking out to other directories from a directory-style site.

Junk SERPs is probably the best cause.

Once a site gets a “judgment against it”, as they phrase it, you can forget it in Yahoo.

I know Yahoo is near the top of Alexa, but if you look deeper, all their traffic is under Mail, not search! and that is very true. See the below data. When Yahoo was carrying Google’s results, we saw a solid 5 times the traffic from G.

Here is the data for similar audience

search.myspace.com 117
en.wikipedia.org 116
collect.myspace.com 116
login.myspace.com 116
profileedit.myspace.com 116
bulletin.myspace.com 115
viewmorepics.myspace.com 115

And the top subdomains of yahoo are mail.yahoo.com with 67.5%, login.yahoo.com with 59.8%, search.yahoo.com with 19.3%.

To conclude, Yahoo deindexes the pages only when it pulls a trigger on the site.

Whatever the filter may be You can actually see that Yahoo indexes or deindexes the site faster than Google does

Google’s products lack in Usability

Ravi — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:49:38 +0000

Google’s stuff lacks the usability of Yahoo’s services, the “intimate connection in usability” Yahoo has with its users.
Comparing usage of Yahoo’s email and instant messaging versus those from Google. Yahoo has a big edge in email users, with 249 million. Gmail has picked up 60 million users.
On the Instant desktop messenger side, Yahoo’s 77.9 million users are well ahead of Google Talk’s 3.4 million. The typical Internet user needs a good usability experience to go along with the functionality.
Also check the previous post on difference between yahoo and Google.
You can also check the other search engines like AskX.com which concentrates well on usability giving a lot of options.

Yahoo search submit basic revamp

Ravi — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:53:43 +0000

Search Submit Basic enables you to submit up to 5 URLs per domain for inclusion in non-sponsored search results on Yahoo!, and other portals such as AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

Your URLs are refreshed (re-crawled) every 7 business days to ensure that the most up-to-date content is available to search users.
When you initiate your Search Submit Basic subscription, a nonrefundable annual fee of $49 per URL is charged. This annual fee also includes account setup and a basic quality review of your pages. You can submit a maximum of 5 URLs per domain into the program.

Probably the biggest change to previous programs, is the depth of reporting available. They throw in the free analytics. The program is administered by PositionTech

On the other hand, After checking the Yahoo’s content guidelines, as they look to be significantly expanded from the older programs.

From the amount of background chatter this is generating even before it is officially relaunched, I’d say Yahoo is going to push this as a value add pretty hard.

In addition to above news, Check these other features that Yahoo has come up in the recent time.

Yahoo is serious in its search business

World’s First ” Web 2.0 Live Ask Engine” for Users – Jyve

Ravi — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:28:15 +0000

Jyve, the world’s first “web 2.0 live ask engine,”(probably the first web2.0 search engine) is more targeted than Googling, and more interactive than Ask.com and more helpful than asking “guides” with no interest in a topic, Jyve creates live conversations between people with self-defined common interests for live help and technical peer support.

Jyve believes real people know lots of things that aren’t easily found on the Web. Jyve offers live access to people and what they know, a means of quickly connecting with someone who has the exact information you need or knows right where to find it.”

Any user can use Jyve to get live “how to” information, assistance with Web searches and tips and advice on everything from what type of laptop to buy (and how to configure it) to learning languages, cooking, mountain biking, etc.

How It Works

When visitors to www.jyve.com type in questions, notices are instantly sent to the desktops of logged-in members who have tagged the topic as one they are knowledgeable in. Members can then “Jyve live” by chatting on the Jyve site, or enter one-on-one conversations via IM or VoIP call. Those seeking answers can evaluate an “expert’s” Jyve profile before entering into private sessions or paid transactions.

Jyve’s Success story

Jyve was founded as an award-winning plug-in for Skype users and quickly attracted a grassroots community of 30,000 members in 50 countries worldwide. Jyve was recently included in Skype’s Extras 3.0 suite and continues to bring members of the Skype community together to share information. As the world’s first “live ask engine,” Jyve extends the use of free, Web-based communications to eclipse static search tools.

About Jyve

Jyve was founded in 2004 to bring the knowledge stored in peoples’ minds worldwide online. Based in San Francisco and privately held, Jyve offers members the opportunity to build presence, credibility and business networks online with no upfront costs, and gives manufacturers and service providers a means of extending “peer support” to customers without adding internal resources. Jyve holds two provisional patents for “productizing knowledge” & metering time using Voice-over-IP and Instant Message (IM).

We have seen that there were recent improvements, new features from other search engines too like yahoo suggestion boards and AskX.com and ofcourse the custom vertical search engines that anyone create from Google or Swicki who are already in the search engine war.

I keep using all these search engines and their services, features at different times for different topics. Your comments are most appreciated.