Why wont yahoo index my site? Noone else has a problem

[Grinler]

Maybe someone can help me. I am having a tough time getting Yahoo to index my site.

Heres the stats:

GoogleBot has hit a page on my site 17,133 times since October 29
MSN Search has hit a page on my over 4000 times at around the same time frame
Ask Jeeves has hit me 7000+ in the same time frame
Heck, Archive.org has hit me 1100 times since then.

Yahoo? THey have hit me 553 times!

I really do not understand why i am not seeing more indexing from yahoo.

Google is showing 1100 links pointing back to me (though I am sure there is more out there) so its not like there are not enough sites out there that yahoo should not be able to find me

When I do a listing based on the particular domain i see 279 entries in Yahoo.

When I do a listing based on the particular domain i see 591 entries in AskJeeves.

When I do a listing based on the particular domain i see 19k+ entries in Google.


My site is search engine friendly. So not sure what else I should do.

[bhartzer]

You've only been waiting since October 29th. Yahoo! can take up to a few months to get your pages listed in their index.

[Grinler]

My site has been up for about 7 months now.

My question is why are all the other engines so active on my site and yet yahoo is so inactive.

This is the regular activity i see on search engines to my site. Yahoo is always the lowest hitter by a huge margin.

For such a big player, that to me does not sound right.

[benc007]

That is indeed very strange. In fact I am having the same problem. Any information or suggestions would be appreciated.

[alienzhavelanded]

Sorry, but based on all your other SE rankings, not to mention the total combined...I don't see why you're so concerned LOL

[jawn_tech]

Historically, same here. I've often called Yahoo's slurp a slug.

I can imagine that might change someday though. For the time being, your predicament sounds normal.

[CJacobson]

First, I wish I had your "problem". I'm no expert... but personally I think the more interesting question is why should any search engine need to visit your website more than 553 times in five short days to pretty much know what you have to offer. And - no offence intended - I think Google is NUTS to waste so much time visiting you. They should spread their resources around more. Seventeen thousand times in five days? Do you have that much content? Does your content change that fast? For your keywords, does it make any sense Google should rethink your ranking 2.6 times per minute?

Consider this:
When I search Yahoo for "Bleeping Computer", your page is listed first. When I select "cache" I get a snapshot of your homepage from October 28. (That date appears as the "posted" date on several articles...)
When I do the exact same thing on Google, I ALSO get October 28.

By the way, I see you have a PR of 6. If my advice has done you any good, would you mind linking to my site? (It's www.storyboardtoys.com...) Ha!

[urknighterrent]

You have 2970 incoming links. Links are googles primary determining factor for page rank. Every time the crawler finds you from an outside link your page rank improves.

Yahoo does not put the same importance on outside links. It does deep crawls, but they're not as massive as googles and your link popularity is not as important a factor.

Also, be aware that google is very leery of johnny-come-lately sites. They will not index you on the first crawl that they find you. If you're still there when they come back, they'll check you for dynamic content, then index you.

[Grinler]

Sorry, but based on all your other SE rankings, not to mention the total combined...I don't see why you're so concerned LOL

Trust me I am extremely happy with my rankings on some of the engines :) I have put a ton of work getting there, but yahoo is still a major entity out there regardless of how much more google produces.

With 20k+ referrers from google this month already and only 243 from yahoo it just seems a little off. That is even more so considering how many people on this forum have been reporting a major increase of referrers from yahoo.


First, I wish I had your "problem". I'm no expert... but personally I think the more interesting question is why should any search engine need to visit your website more than 553 times in five short days to pretty much know what you have to offer. And - no offence intended - I think Google is NUTS to waste so much time visiting you. They should spread their resources around more. Seventeen thousand times in five days? Do you have that much content? Does your content change that fast? For your keywords, does it make any sense Google should rethink your ranking 2.6 times per minute?


Well I have a a very large amount of backlinks...that alone will generate mroe activity back to my site. As my site is referenced a lot on forums and other pages, crawlers are going to constantly run into me.

And yes I have a TON of content. My site is all content and is forum based with about 500-600 new posts a day so the content and keywords do change frequently. I also think this behaviour is somewhat transient, as a lot of people have been reporting google hitting their sites hard lately. That will probably calm down in the future but I am not complaining right now.



Consider this:
When I search Yahoo for "Bleeping Computer", your page is listed first. When I select "cache" I get a snapshot of your homepage from October 28. (That date appears as the "posted" date on several articles...)
When I do the exact same thing on Google, I ALSO get October 28.


Well not sure what that could mean....but my main concern is still the fact that Yahoo does not tend to index my site or at least my entire site. site:bleepingcomputer.com in google returns 13-15k pages. site:bleepingcomputer.com in yahoo returns 309.

That to me looks strange and im losing a lot of potential visitors.



By the way, I see you have a PR of 6. If my advice has done you any good, would you mind linking to my site? (It's www.storyboardtoys.com...) Ha!


I wish i could but I make it a point to only link to sites that are related to mine. Sorry :(

[kefer]

Grinler
I feel your pain I was right were you are until I did the following. First let me say that your site is very impressive, ok Yahoo is very picky on how you use your Title, meta tags and Content, they need to match at 100% accuracy. I will start with your

“Title” the obvious is of course don’t exceed 80 characters, and try to use more Keyword and Phrases that not only describe the page, but words that appear in the page as well. This will give your Title a 100% relevancy.

”Meta Tags Description”
When writing your meta tag description, select the most important four or five keywords per page. Write careful 200 characters sentences and phrases targeting the most important words contained on your web page. When you are writing meta tag descriptions, try to eliminate as many filler words as you can to make room for your keywords. Overloading your description (or any other page component) with the same keyword or keyword phrase is known as spamming. This may get your page penalized rather then help your page’s search engine position.

”Meta Tag Keywords”
Limit keywords to a maximum of 20 words. You can separate each keyword with a comma and a space witch I am sure a lot of us know, however you do not have to use both you can have a comma and no space, or a space and no comma. As of now you have well over the maximum and you are repeating the word “computer” at lease 10 times which could be seen by Yahoo as spamming even if you are using it in a phrase such as “computer help”. It is good to only place the word “computer” only once not more than 3 times and it will be relevant. Here is a example, <meta name="Keywords" content="computer,help,novice,newbie, spyware,adware,spybot,Hijackthis,tech,techtv’> One more thing do not place any words in the Keyword tag that are not on your front page. This at lease for Yahoo is very important, if it is on the page this will make your Keyword relevancy a 100%. Right spelling of keywords is important as well if it is not spelled right Yahoo counts it as not 100%, I have experienced that if 1 word is misspelled it will make it 95% and etc.

I know that all this sounds like something we have all heard or read at leased a million times but I know for Yahoo the Meta Tags still play a big part of weather or not your ranks will be good or not. As of right now my web site is ranking pretty good in Yahoo as well as G and I saw a major increase in ranks when I made sure the tags where right. I went from being a page 5 rank in yahoo for my Targeted Keywords to a page 1 in the Top 10 at leased. I hope this can be a help to you as it has been for me.

[urknighterrent]

Besides the meta tags, which a SUPER importnt to your yahoo listing, there are some content changes to consider.

Yahoo prefers lots of short pages to one long one. Once you go above about 400 words you're taking chances. If you're after yahoo break your site up a little and optimize the different pages to different words with the most important on your index page.

Things like keyword density need to be considered. All should appear at least three times in your visible text. Consider the keywords in your page title your "primary keywords". 7 is a safe max. Your "primary keywords" should apear...

About 5 times in the visible area of the text, including the first 25 words and the last paragraph.

In one of the first three graphics with an alt tag.

In a header statement.

In a text link.

In other words, if you optimize to yahoo, you're going to have to change your google strategy. If you don't you may lose relevance to some of the anchor text on your incoming links because you'll be reducing the relevance of some of the keywords on your index page. I'm not sure that's such a great idea.

If it aint broken, don't fix it.

[urknighterrent]

Hmmmn, that could be read to mean don't do anything. That's not what I meant.

Kefer is 100% right about cleaning up your meta tags. It will not only get you up on Yahoo, it may just boost you on Google a little as well.

Just don't fiddle with the content if it reduces the relevance of your incoming links.

[Grinler]

Thanks for the info all.. I will take a look and see what I can do. I am actually less concerned with getting higher rankings in yahoo currently then in just getting indexed by them. Maybe they just take a bit longer than google, or do not like something on the page. Regardless, I will look into cleaing up my meta's more. Thanks again