SEO: Does Yahoo Get It With Site Indexing? NOT!

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends. - Woody Allen

After a lot of pain, contacts and fixing, I'm not sure that they do. I am not going to name names or point fingers, but really, Yahoo seems to have completely lost it in the search engine wars. You put up a new website, create a sitemap, submit it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN ("live.com"), and you do everything right, including adding the new accepted "sitemap" directive to your robots file.

Google jumps right on it. Within a day or so, virtually every entry in your sitemap is going to get indexed. If you ping them via the various RPC Ping server addresses and you have engineered the ability to update and use their Webmaster tools, the googlebot doesn't seem to have any trouble at all indexing your "stuff". That's coolio with me, because over a range of websites, I've found that the Googly Bear is responsible for 90% of my search engine traffic to the site.

And - depending on what kind of a site you've got - that could represent up to 90% of your total traffic! We've got real chemistry here, I felt it!

Live.com is trying, but in Google Analytics, they rarely show up in anything less than 5th place among the major search engines in terms of what percentage of total pageviews they are responsible for on my sites.

But Yahoo? D00D, they SUCK -- Totally and completely! Usually, depending on the site, they can only be found down in 7th or 8th place. I know of several instances (one of which I have been personally involved in) of webmasters going back and forth, back and forth -- with the Yahoo people, getting reports like "Well, our engineers made a mistake, and we will fix it right away" -- and yet the results are that the number of pages reported being indexed -- GOES DOWN!

SEO expert Mike Valentine claims that Google drives 74% the traffic to a range of business web sites he manages. He claims it is because Google delivers more relevant results and isn't afraid for searchers to click on results and leave Google. Valentine says that searchers want to find what they are looking for and easily see through transparent attempts to sell stuff to them and keep them from leaving.

But that still doesn't explain why Yahoo does such a poor job of indexing legitimate, unique content on many sites.

I don't know what these people are smoking, but either I don't understand their business model - or -- THEY SUCK.

Here is an example of real 30 - day traffic (pageviews) generated solely from the major search engines, ranked by "Who's on First":

google 1,294,146
live 1,904
aol 1,816
search 1,608 (proprietary)
ask 1,509
msn 976
yahoo 93

Yikes! What am I talking , Greek? It's as plain as day, folks!

"We're working on it" just doesn't cut it with me, Pal -- not after a whole month of pain and frustration. Hey Jerry? -- you want my business? You gotta learn to index my site, man.


Yahoo? How About DMOZ?

Corruption? How about this....

Has DMOZ become corrupt? Wouldn't surprise me in the least. Read all the coments on the linked post, and weep. Bastards!

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:45 AM

    Yes indeed, Yahoo blows as a search engine. But they sure do have a nice fantasy football system :)

    Regards...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rick Strahl2:00 PM

    Peter, is the search engine the problem or the fact that 90% of people actually use Google?

    ReplyDelete
  3. peterbromberg2:08 PM

    Heh. We all know that 90% of the people are using Google. Yahoo simply doesn't index many pages for whatever reason. So, the result in conversions of searches at Yahoo (out of it's 10% or so that it generates) don't end up on your site, because their index of your site doesn't have anywhere near the number of pages that Google does -- at least, in my experience. It is not consistent either, since I have seen Yahoo do a very thorough job on one site with many pages successfully indexed, yet on another site with more "authority" of content, very few of the pages show up in their index.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous7:31 AM

    Yahoo also seems to assign a good rank to pages that are overstuffed with keywords. Google has better results since they seem to favor a more natural use of keywords. The result is Yahoo searches return more pages that are really just seach engine spam.

    ReplyDelete

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