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Yahoo!, which has been historically content rather than product based, recently gained market share while Google lost. Even though the amount was very small (less than 1%), Yahoo still holds over 20% market share according to Hitwise. SEO professionals often optimize strictly for Google (here are a few tips) and Yahoo! is often overlooked and thus 20% market share is missed. This is unacceptable. Below are a few SEO tips for Yahoo that should be kept in mind when optimizing pages. They can help you rank well in Yahoo without sacrificing rankings in Google, allowing you to capture more SEO traffic.
Yahoo! counts no follow links. Yahoo’s Director of Search Tim Mayer was quoted on Search Engine Journal as saying:
If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link… Then the [no followed] target will be crawled and indexed based on our algorithms.
In short, the “no follow” link will not help the website rank higher, but it will help it get noticed and indexed.
Yahoo places more emphasis on keyword density. A webpronews article published last year had a great paragraph that explains Yahoo and Google keyword density:
Google likes a density of around 2% and Yahoo likes a density as high as 7% or even 8%. This means that you can effectively use 4 variations of a single keyword or phrase and a density of 2% for each. This offers further advantages. With Google you are now gearing your content towards four different keywords and offering the level they want, and you are still providing Yahoo with the much higher density rate that they require. Because you can include plurals and further stems of keywords this means you can write in a much more natural tone.
Along with that, Yahoo also uses the “robots-nocontent” tag which can help increase keyword density without having an impact on Google. Just Searching had a great article about this topic published only a few days ago:
Yahoo! recently admitted to using a tag called robots-nocontent, which when placed around content on a page tells Yahoo! to ignore the text for ranking purposes. What this allows you to do is to filter out text such as navigation, copyright text or external RSS feeds from Yahoo!, thus increasing the density of your keyword text on the page. Currently Google does not use this tag, so by increasing your Yahoo! density you shouldn’t be harming your Google density.
Like Google, Yahoo considers the age of inbound (aka backlinks) links. However, evolt.org suggests, in an article published over a year ago, that:
Yahoo! is placing a large amount of emphasis on the age of links though not in the same way that Google is. We will get to Google shortly however to understand what to expect from Yahoo! one must understand that when you get a link to your website it won’t hold it’s full value for a number of months. While the exact number of months in unknown it appears to be around 8 before it hold it’s full weight though it will hold some from day one and this weight will increase as time passes.
That should be enough to get you started. Much like Google, Yahoo takes a black box approach so we’ll never know what goes into rankings. We can assume some pretty standard stuff like meta, keywords, age, etc - but Yahoo will ALWAYS do something slightly different than Google and those differences need to be capitalized on.
By no means am I saying SEO professionals should focus on Yahoo instead of Google. Rather I’m suggesting that instead of optimizing just for Google, websites should be optimized for Yahoo as well. Why miss out on 20%+ of the market?
Technorati Tags: yahoo, google, seo, search engine optimization, yahoo seo
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