Optimization for Yahoo - Optimizing For Yahoo Search
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The fastest way to show up in Yahoo's search results is to pay Yahoo to join their Search Submit Program. Once you've submitted your site, Yahoo will send out a SLURP crawler to index the site and put it up for review by one of Yahoo's editors.
If you're after Google, expect to see rankings on Yahoo before you see them on Google.
Links and On-page Factors
Yahoo places more value on on-page factors than Google does. Google will usually aim to filter out pages too aligned with a targeted keyword in inbound anchor text, title, H1 and H2 headings, while Yahoo is more forgiving. Yahoo is also much easier on link quality than Google. While Google is top-heavy on power links, Yahoo will count many spammy links that Google would drop. Be careful though, since too many spammy links can hurt Google rankings.
Yahoo is more tolerant of site wide links. I did an article in the past on a technique shared by Patrick Altoft from Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts:
"I cloak links so that MSN and Yahoo see different links than Google. For example, if I had a site with thousands of pages, I would add a site wide link to one of my other sites. I would do some simple cloaking so that Google didn't see the site wide link, but MSN & Yahoo did. This allows you to be really aggressive with link building for Yahoo & MSN and not raise any flags with Google. You get quick rankings in 2 search engines without harming your link profile in the one that matters."
As you can see, you can get away with much more with Yahoo than Google. Yahoo also looks at links that go to a page vs links that go to a site when determining its relevancy. The down side of the technology is that they don't count link age and link domain as much as Google does, so it's easier to manipulate their results. Pages from a new site can do well as long as there are inbounds with targeted anchor text.
It's okay to be more aggressive with anchor text, but be careful not to hurt your standing in Google.
Site Age
Yahoo places some weight on site and domain age, but not as much as Google does.
Human Editors
Yahoo is known to review its index and adjust search results for some popular categories like credit cards, Viagra, loans and others. When you use Search Submit, the site is reviewed by human editors by default.
To keep the index cleaner, human editors review competitive categories. If a site is of good quality it can be given a boost in the search results, while low quality or spam sites can be easily dropped. It's not clear how the review process works in Yahoo. Where Google relies primarily on math and uses human editors to review sites flagged by algorithms, Yahoo may go in 100% manual and do section reviews without regard for algorithms.
You can check Yahoo's Search Content Quality Guidelines to see what Yahoo considers spam. If a site gets flagged, you'll need to clean it up and then ask Yahoo to put it back in the search results.
Crawls
Yahoo is pretty good at crawling the web. One of Yahoo's better features is Yahoo Site Explorer and Search Command, which help with competitive link analysis. It's not as good at detecting spam as Google, so it crawls far more spam.
Spam
Yahoo has trouble with differentiating spam links from editorial links; Google is far better at this. This is partly due to saturation of Yahoo's team on many unrelated fronts. While Google's 20,000 employees are primarily focused on search, Yahoos 15,000 staff members work on many unrelated projects. Yahoo needs to focus more on search technology than on content-based products to decrease Google's lead in the search arena.
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