Yesterday I was fortunate enough to have lunch with Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR, who shared some revealing insight into the new Yahoo! Search.
Jarboe learned that the Yahoo! Slurp bot doesn’t follow links as closely as the Google bot. Instead, Slurp pays more attention to on page factors such as keywords and title tags to determine a site’s relevance.
His theory: in an effort to get its own search solution up quickly, it’s possible that Yahoo! just rolled out the already-existing Inktomi technology with a few variations of its own. Within the next month or two, he predicts Yahoo! may also roll out AlltheWeb technology, which takes links into consideration the way Google does.
Yahoo may be less inclined to roll out link analysis because link analysis concerns off page elements that are often out of the user’s control. These factors could potentially diminish your page rankings and you would not necessarily be able to control them at all.
He also has one conjecture. “If you’re standing on the grassy knoll and you look West, where do you make the money? Through paid inclusion or through links?”
Of course, the answer here is paid inclusion. He believes Yahoo! will hold off on the off page factors of AlltheWeb until it begins to get user complaints. This is just his conspiracy theory, however, and he has no evidence to support that statement.
While paid inclusion offers an increased crawl rate of every 48 hours, it doesn't necessarily guarantee your position in the search engine results pages.
Why participate in paid inclusion then? Jarboe is quick to point out that "Yahoo! is the tweaker's dream." With its frequent crawls, Yahoo’s paid inclusion program allows you to tweak on page elements like crazy to easily raise search engine rankings.
That is going to be a major draw for advertisers to participate in the paid inclusion program.
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Originally Posted by Dave Hawley
