REVIEWING YAHOO CHANGES

Well Yahoo bought Inktomi, All the Web, Overture (and Alta Vista as part of the deal).All the Web & Alta Vista were promptly put on the back burner with no further development assigned to the search engines but with the indexes kept alive. Yahoo announced a new product called Overture Site Match (not to be confused with Overture keyword bidding). Site Match has a registration fee of $49 for the first url and a click through cost on Tier One of 15 cents (mostly non biz type of stuff) or Tier Two of 30 cents for most business categories for every search that goes from Yahoo to your site. Even for a medium sized business these costs may be out of reach at what can easily become hundreds to thousands of dollars each month. Better to invest in keyword bidding to ensure your results with Yahoo in my opinion. Just to make sure their own newly acquired Inktomi users wouldn't get inclusion for the one time yearly fee Yahoo purged out Inktomi listings as of April 15th.

I do not recommend to any of my customers that they pay Site Match fees because you are not getting any perferred treatment in placement and you can get listed without the click thru fees. Yahoo appears to be giving fair weight to it's directory listings which are still available for $299 US per year whereas before they always came after Yahoo's Google web index listings. I not a big fan of paying $299 year for their directory listings either. The GOOD news is you can get on Yahoo for free if you don't mind waiting two months and this is part of SEO's standard registration or you can keyword bid to place. Besides even if you don't pay, Yahoo will eventually find you via links to your site.

Yahoo's algorithm called SLURP behaves alot like Googles and the old Inktomi algorithm although they display differently than the the pure Inktomi driven HotBot results by example. Yahoo places significant weight on the description and title tag where Google only cares about title.

Yahoo does not follow image links.Yahoo's spider cannnot follow frames pages, flash, or dynamic pages but is very adept like Google at following links around your site. Therefore html page links and site maps are essential.

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