Yahoo

[tomsk]

I am interested in seo for Yahoo, are there some absolutes when dealing with yahoo, I know about links with Google etc but no joy with listings in Yahoo!

Ps OWG I promise I am not stalking you!

[susannad]

sorry, what do you mean 'some absolutes' ?

[Chris]

Here is a very interesting article on yahoo.

http://www.metamend.com/yahoo.html

Note.. its Human Driven that means its being reviewed by a human therefore the SEO side of it is not something you can automate.You could design a front door specfically to submit to yahoo and talk all about your keyword areas etc to get the human to rank you the way you want.

[copywriter]

Chris, I believe TomSK is talking about Yahoo search engine, not Yahoo directory. (Although I could be wrong.)

[tomsk]

Sorry not to make myself clear what I meant was I know Google likes links to your site, is that the same with yahoo?

It’s widely believed that Google ignores meta tags, does yahoo?

So I guess what I am asking is what do we know yahoo likes to see from a site.

Titles, descriptions etc.

[Old Welsh Guy]

Google relies far more heavilly than Yahoo on link benefit. Yahoo does use link weight, but it treats it with a little more scepticism than G. Yahoo likes traditional SEO methods. I have found that by doing what I have always done, I get good results on Yahoo, and adding links gives the icing on the cake in Google. MSN is much the same as google relying on traditional SEO.

I honestly can not say which of the tags Yahoo uses or ignores, as I have not tested which do not work I DO know that if you use a good description, and keywords METAS, that are specific and on the page then Yahoo! likes you.

The only problem with Yahoo is getting the bloody spider to spider.

[BWelford]

I believe with Yahoo! the description may be as important as the on-page content.

The keyword metatag has very little value with any search engine now. However I did read a recent interview where a Yahoo rep. said that it was still used to identify possible mis-spelling variants of a word, but not as part of the general search algorithm.

[David Wallace]

I saw yesterday that Yahoo was displaying the meta description tag again as the description that appears in the SERPs. They were using snippets from the content areas of pages like Google does. i don't know when they changed this. Anyone else seeing this?

That is why it is good to always make sure you optimize meta description tags and html copy as you never know what search engines are going to do next.

[Richey]

Yahoo has been shaking things up a bit for a while now. I think they are trying to get rid of the bugs they've had since day one. With the google IPO and the new MSN beta coming closer to rolling out, I think they are just trying different things to optimize their results.

[StupidScript]

Yahoo has been shaking things up a bit for a while now.

LOL! What an understatement! Ever since they bought Overture, their programming has been all over the place in almost every area (spiders, reporting, etc.etc.) They seem to be having difficulties integrating with (or expunging) the Overture engineering team.

The bottom line is:
Good SEO practices are good for ALL spiders and ALL visitors.

There are some "tricks" and such that can temporarily influence some programs, like the "Google likes backlinks" comments illustrate, however these are not to be taken as the final word on what to do.

The best SERPS come from quality content married to clean code and appropriate SEO. Don't worry too much about the "trick of the day". If you keep it clean and useful, your SERPS will reflect that, and so will the directories.

Quality content begets backlinks, too, which add authority and improve your ranking in SEs that pay attention to that stuff.

If you are not showing up in Yahoo as you expect, take a hard look at (a) your code (use the W3C's validator to get it perfect), (b) your content (is it really valuable or am I trying too hard to sell something?), and (c) your keyword density (maybe check out the tool for this at KeywordCount.com to see how you compare to the competition).

Here's a brutal article about SEO for the big SEs, including Yahoo. It's not too recent, but it includes some useful information that may help you.