How to Get Site Indexed using Yahoo! Free Submit

Monte: Okay, give me 5 ways that someone can really be successful using Yahoo! Search.

Tim: Yea, I mean, if you want to get in some of the good ways to get into our search engine are obviously linked from an existing page in the index. That’s a very quick way. Other ways that pretty much ensures you’re in are…another thing people don’t know about is our free submit product actually picks things up incredibly fast.

Monte: How do people get signed up on that?

Tim: You just go to the free submit page, it’s a link, and if you go to the help page of Yahoo! Search, it will say “How Do I Submit My Site?” You go in there, and you should be able to get a page in in a few days. A lot of people say, “Oh, I won’t get in.” We do have very strong…I mean if you have a spammy page, don’t expect it to get in because we do run a lot of….we do check those for spam very thoroughly.

Monte: But I bet you a lot of people didn’t know that because they probably think they would have to pay to get submitted to be picked up. Now we know they can actually go through the Free Submit and that it works.

Tim: Yea, we should find you very quickly in the Free Submit. We’ve been crawling much more aggressively and I’ve heard that feedback from people that they feel we are spidering the site a lot more frequently and people are saying, “Oh, wow, you are spidering me a lot and I’m not seeing myself in the index.” You know, people should be patient because we have crawled at different speeds. We have some that get you in in under a day for sites that we feel are very important and then we have some we crawl. We update a couple of times a week, and then we have other updates that might take up to a few weeks. So,…..

Monte: So, you can expect a pretty wide range of results from that, depending on…I mean when you say important, how do you measure importance in terms of that analysis. I mean what do you classify as being important in terms of that?

Tim: An important page would be from an authoritative site. I mean, obviously links help us determine that there are a lot of other quality factors we use which will help you …help determine that as well. I mean, obviously is something is 10 or 15 directories deep, that might be considered less important than something that is 1, 2 or 3 levels deep. You know, people need to get deeply crawled, make your site, your content something reasonable in terms of directory depth. Make something 3 or 4 levels maximum; don’t have something that is extremely low-level, because that will just be given…obviously a human and a crawler will have a much harder time discovering that content.

Monte: Okay. Any other tips regarding that?

Tim: What else can I share? One of the things people need to understand about, “Do I rank well in Google; do I rank differently in Yahoo! than Google?” I mean there are lots of reasons. One could be just our ranking of them is different. Another could be you have one engine or the other thinks you have spammy content, and you’ve been found…either Google said “Wow, this site we think is low quality and is spamming us” or Yahoo! might have found out about that site and dealt with it appropriately. Sometimes the other site…the other people don’t find that; and you can’t say, “Oh well, we’re number 30 at Yahoo! and we’re number 1 at Google. There’s no way we could be spam.” That might be just because Google hasn’t determined you as spam and it could be the same vice versa. I think a lot of…because Google was so big for a long time, people say, “Oh well, if I’m ranking number 1 in Google and I’m not ranked in Yahoo!, somehow the search engine is broken.”

Monte: Alright. And, I mean, is there a different definition of spam…I mean if you are blatant spam; but in that particular example you just gave where one engine might determine that it’s spam and one engine doesn’t, how does Yahoo! determine what is spam and what is not?

Tim: I think generally the engines are pretty consistent about what they think is spam and what they don’t think is spam. I think what it is is there are so many pages out there and so many different ways of spamming and people have different detection mechanisms. So, one engine catches some people, and the other engine catches other people, and that’s why you have a bunch of disparity in this area.