Summary: Like most search engines, Yahoo issues guidance on what it considers to be desirable factors for your website. This is your best guidance on how to get ranked well in Yahoo.
Yahoo is a directory – it reviews its websites manually so the quality standards are far higher. Before you even think about ranking well in Yahoo, you need to consider how you’re going to get in! You can pay to be reviewed but there’s no guarantee of inclusion.
Yahoo issues webmaster guidelines like most search engines. These state that the following are desirable for websites:
- Your content should be of genuine value, unique and original
- Your pages should be created with people in mind, not just search engines#
- You should make good use of hyperlinks to assist people in finding relevant content
- Your meta data should accurately describe your content (title and description)
- You should exercise good web design principles generally.
What Yahoo doesn’t like…
As well as guidelines on what works well for them, Yahoo provide a list of factors it considers undesirable. These include:
Some, but not all, examples of the types of content that Yahoo! does not want include:
- Content that is detrimental to the accuracy, relevance or diversity of search results. In other words, spammy pages of little or no value.
- Doorway pages (those that redirect the user to somewhere else)
- Duplicate content or sites
- Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames.
- Pages that are produced en mass – for example, auto generated pages or those of very low value (‘cookie cutter pages’)
- Pages that use any methods aimed at artifically increasing their ranking
- Hidden text or hidden links
- Pages that use cloaking
- Excessive cross linking with other sites / link schemes
- Pages that aren’t built for people but are built for search engines
- Using a competitor name to try and increase rankings
- Use of pop ups excessively, which interferes with navigation
- Pages that appear to be deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience.
It’s evident that Yahoo’s guidelines focus far more on quality factors that will only be detected through a manual review.
Just because Yahoo focuses on quality though, don’t be tempted to focus all your efforts on Yahoo as the better search engine. Remember that Yahoo only commands a small percentage of the search engine market, in comparison to its big rival Google.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!