Search Engine Optimisation for Yahoo

While Google serves around 70% of the search engine queries, Yahoo is the next largest search engine with around 20% of the total search market. If your site is experiencing the sandbox, optimising for Yahoo can be a good alternative in the meantime.

Yahoo’s Search Algorithm

Yahoo’s directory is believed to be biased toward on-page factors such as content and keyword density. It does not use a PageRank method to discriminate between sources. It may also be using web 2.0 sites that it owns to draw on content. Yahoo Answers, allows people to ask questions and people reply. Interested readers can vote on the applicability of the replies to screen the advice. These site may also help with ranking as they are heavily pushed in the search results and so may help when ranking with Yahoo.

It also owns Del.icio.us which is a social bookmarking site. So it may cross-reference information from this site as a measure of relevance.

Ranking Factors

Titles, meta information

The title information in Yahoo can be longer than the 65 character maximum shown in Google and use of keywords in the title, description and keywords is a good idea. Of course the title should be unique to the page and follow the usual guidelines.

Content

Good unique content is still just as important. Create content for your readers. Use keywords that are in the meta description and meta keywords but don’t overdo it. There is some evidence that, Yahoo has a duplicate content filter, so your content should be your own work.

Linking

Off-topic and reciprocal links still work well for ranking in Yahoo.

Domain Age

Some influence from the age of the domain may be important in ranking algorithm but less importance is placed than in Google.

Paid Inclusion

The Yahoo directory allows for sites to pay for listing in the directory. It currently costs $299 per year and this will send Yahoo’s robot Slurp to crawl your site get you listed in the Yahoo search results. It will also help in your Google search results because a link from the Yahoo directory is still has a lot of link-weight. Spam sites are unlikely to pay to get a link for a single site.