With a reported 22.1% of search traffic Yahoo is second only to Google’s 64.4% (src: Hitwise) for search user volume so it is extremely important not to forget that attaining a top ranking in Yahoo can be a big boon to the bottom line. As a result, I decided to write this update on how to attain superior rankings in Yahoo using today’s useful tools and tactics.
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When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.
Often I find myself making a page title relevant for a wide basket of related keywords, then when I check the rankings the page comes in at #12 or #16. My mom’s blog currently ranks at #13 in Google for weight loss calculators and #4 for free weight loss calculators using the page title Free Diet, Calorie, & Weight Loss Calculators. The page also ranks #30 for diet calculators and is deep for calorie calculators.
The best thing to do here is to focus the title on the phrase closest to ranking at the top, and try to get it a few more links. If the page starts picking up organic traction after ranking and eventually grows into a self reinforcing authority status then I could help it get more traffic by including those related phrases that don’t make much sense to highlight in the page title right now.
If you haven’t been busy at SES in our neck of the woods this week, you might have noticed we’ve been rolling out fresh updates to our crawl, index and ranking systems — ones that are relatively significant for webmasters.
In response to feedback from the community, we’re reducing our crawling machines by a significant amount with this update, so you might have observed a significant reduction in crawl load from us along with fewer machine IP addresses hitting you over the last few days.
The new crawler continues to improve comprehensiveness and freshness of coverage while also enhancing crawl efficiency, which reduces spurious load on websites.
We had a brief bout of increased crawl load while testing and rolling out updates, like support for ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer, announced yesterday. Don’t fret, though, if you’re concerned about seeing an increased load. We’ve initiated efforts and established policies internally to ensure this doesn’t happen, even temporarily, in the future.
Thanks and keep the feedback coming.
Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search
I’ve spent a lot of time running searches a Live.com this week and noticed that, more than any of the other engines, Live seems to rank domains and pages that have the keywords in the URL, and the domain name. This appears to work equally effectively for subdomains, so using a subdomain strategy when targeting Live in particular may be a great way to go. Of course, they’re one of the most active engines about algo shifts, so it may not last for long, but its certainly effective right now.
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