The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have made major changes to their crawling process, plus rolled out a new update to their crawling, indexing and ranking systems. Recently, there have been many complaints that Yahoo's crawler, Yahoo Slurp, is crawling sites too heavily. Yahoo says it has taken this feedback and has improved their crawl process to have less of an impact on servers. You should notice a reduction in crawl load from Slurp, the company says. [...]

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The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are currently rolling out a web search update. Priyank Garg's "weather report" said: We've been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. You may see changes in the Yahoo Search results over the next couple days. [...]

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The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are doing an index and ranking algorithm update. The update started last night and should be "complete very soon," said Priyank Garg of Yahoo Search. Yahoo's last update was just a few weeks ago on May 22nd. That update was a minor update. [...]

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The Yahoo Search Blog announced the transition of Yahoo Slurp, Yahoo's web crawler, from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net is now complete. The IP addresses and the user-agent are remaining the same but the DNS lookup is different, it is now crawl.yahoo.net. This does not apply to other Yahoo crawlers, including Yahoo China, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Travel and other Yahoo crawlers that have their own user agents. [...]

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Tim Mayer of Yahoo informed us that there will be a Yahoo Search index update tonight. Tim said we should "expect minor changes" over the next few days. The update will conclude this Friday. [...]

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For over a decade, search engines have supported standards allowing you to prevent pages from being spidered or included within a search index. Today, Yahoo now supports a new twist -- a way to flag that part of your page shouldn't be included in an index. It's called the robots-nocontent tag. Many search marketers have long struggled with the problem that the "core" content of a web page -- the main body copy or article -- can often seemed drowned out from a text analytics perspective by all the clutter around the content. That clutter is often ads, navigational links, cross promot [...]

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Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft. Information on how to create sitemaps files can be found at the Sitemaps.org site. Aside from the sitemaps XML formal, you can al [...]

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Site Explorer Matures a Bit More and Accepts Mobile Feeds from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how the Yahoo Site Explorer tool now accepts mobile submissions and feeds, gains the ability to input URLs for deletion and remove more than five at a time (see our Yahoo Site Explorer Adds Features: Delete URL From Index article for more about the remove feature in general), plus a new "Report Spam" button that's been added. [...]

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The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo Slurp, Yahoo's web crawler, is moving from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net. In short, the user agent for Yahoo's crawler will remain "Yahoo! Slurp." However, reverse DNS lookups on the IP address by the true Yahoo crawler will now resolve to crawl.yahoo.net. The transition should take "a few weeks." [...]

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Yahoo Quick Links are little links found beneath some of the search results at Yahoo Search. As an example, a search on barry schwartz at Yahoo Search brings up a Wikipedia entry for the other Barry Schwartz with Quick Links; it looks like this: I have been covering Yahoo Quick Links for a while and got some official answers from Yahoo about how they work. In short, Yahoo Quick Links can happen through both natural and paid means. Buying Yahoo Quick Links Yes, you can buy Quick Links for your listings. Yahoo told me "clients participating in Search Submit Pro can submit their Quick Lin [...]

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Yahoo Removes Category (Directory) Links From Under Search Results at Search Engine Roundtable reports that Yahoo has removed the links from the individual search listings to the Yahoo Directory. In the past, if a page had a listing in the Yahoo Directory, that directory listing would be shown as part of the page's listing in web search results. Here is a before and after that illustrates this: Before: After: This seems to be a pretty big move from Yahoo. This is just one more step in the direction of folding the once very popular Yahoo Directory. Postscript: Search Engine Watch has c [...]

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This morning I reported that both Yahoo and Google are updating the number of links they account for each site. Yahoo! Search Link Update shows a number of webmasters reporting both increases and decreases in the number of links Yahoo is reporting at their Site Explorer Tool. Google Link Update Within Webmaster Central's Link Tool shows that currently, all reports from webmasters show an increase in the number of backlinks reported by Google Webmaster Central. [...]

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In a comment left at the Stepforth blog, Jim Lanzone, Ask.com's CEO, has said that he considers paid inclusion a "dis-service". Jim explains that he finds it "hypocritical to charge for something we need to do anyway," i.e. crawl the web to find quality pages to present to the searcher. In addition, Mr. Lanzone explains that it "blurs the line" between "paid content and editorial content" making it hard for the searcher to possibly trust the search results. Lanzone does not go as far to accuse Yahoo of skewing the results in favor of paid inclusion results. Lanzone does say that "Paid Incl [...]

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Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag -- one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted "Using the robots meta tag," providing some clarity from Google. In addition, both Yahoo and Microsoft have also sent me information on using the tag. I'll run through what everyone says below, complete with charts for easy at-a-glance comparisons. The meta robots tag was an open standard created over a decade ago and designed initiall [...]

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Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It also cover how Yahoo's currently doing a reindexing change that might impact rankings. More on that below, plus tips about also blocking the Open Directory information from being used for your pages and some possible conflicts with multiple robots tags. Sometimes pages are listed in both Yahoo's crawler-based search results and within its human-compil [...]

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A reader emailed me today noticing that Google was showing a date next to his listing, which made me think this was a good time to revisit how, when and where search engines show crawl dates for pages. These dates are a useful way for site owners to understand how often they are being revisited or for anyone to "squeeze the loaf" of a search engine to see how fresh it is. Here's a search engine-by-search engine rundown on date display. I'll also cover how we've sadly lost crawl dates being embedded next to listings, over the years. But that's not all! Read now and you'll even [...]

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Yesterday's rollout of Yahoo's new Panama search advertising ranking system has been both praised and criticized by advertisers (see Panama is LIVE! - for some and Yahoo's Panama: The Switch Is Flipped on The New Ad System). Praised, because the new system is streamlined, easier to use and offers more campaign management tools. Criticized, because the previously relatively simple system of higher bid equals higher placement has been replaced with a more complex formula that includes factors such as ad "quality," brand recognition and other variables that have reduced the transparency of the s [...]

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Since Yahoo rolled out a new Delete URL feature this week, a number of questions have come up on how exactly it works. I had time yesterday with some of the Yahoo Site Explorer team to gather answers. Thanks to Priyank Garg and Amit Kumar, who along with Tim Mayer, went through the inner workings. It's probably most important to understand the difference between how pages have traditionally been kept out of Yahoo versus what Delete URL does. Traditionally, Yahoo is told not to spider pages at all using either a robots.txt file or a meta robots tag that uses the "noindex" setting. [...]

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A week ago, we thought that Lower Case Titles In Yahoo Coming From Anchor Text, and asked Yahoo about it. Tim Mayer of Yahoo has commented on original post at the Search Engine Roundtable saying that this has now been fixed. And, based on the examples in our post from last week, a search on searchbliss now brings up the title tag from that page and does not use internal anchor text (as we theorized) in the Yahoo search results. I have before and after screen captures over here. [...]

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The Yahoo Search Blog officially confirmed the recent speculations of an index update taking place. Priyank Garg of Yahoo says, that Yahoo is "in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process." The update should be done "very soon" according to Priyank. Google also recently did an update and Danny covered a number of issues with January 2007 Update On Google Indexing & Ranking Issues. Plus we are still waiting on word from Yahoo [...]

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