Yahoo is one of the major search engines on the web and for countless millions of users, their main portal for news, entertainment and search queries.  Unfortunately, Yahoo’s indexing systems have never been simple and can take many times longer to index your entire site than search engines like Google take to crawl and index.  This has made Yahoo notoriously more difficult for new websites to work with and can prevent you from being discovered for months or even years by the average Yahoo user.  Today, we will go over some of the main negatives to Yahoo’s indexing and ranking system and also cover some tactics to help you decrease the indexing lag that is oh so often the case.

Yahoo Uses Bing

Since the summer of 2009, Yahoo has been utilizing Bing’s search systems for its website and therefore has no direct control over the indexing process anymore.  Previously, Yahoo did handle this aspect of its search results but it still took way longer for them to index than other search engines and they have since completely handed over operations to Bing.  While this makes things seem simpler, Bing’s indexing methods are in most cases no better than Yahoo’s old, slow process of indexing all the pages on a given website.  In summary, Yahoo is now mainly a reflection of Bing’s results and all original tips on how to index pages via Yahoo are obsolete.

Bing Is Slow

Much like Yahoo’s old way of doing it, Bing’s indexing methods mean that your site could exist without being indexed for months and could take far longer for all pages to be properly discovered and indexed.  Many sites with 10,000+ pages indexed in Google discover that they have less than 1% of that amount discovered by Bing.  Personally, I have not seen a website less than five years old that has a decent amount of pages indexed comparable to Google.  There are ways to increase the speed of indexing slightly and ways to check the progress (coming right up), but any webmaster should be prepared to “be in it for the long run” when it comes to being indexed in Yahoo/Bing.

Submit Your Site to Bing

One of the best ways to make sure that your site is included in Bing results and therefore can grow quickly is by submitting it to Bing directly.  Bing’s Site Submission Page allows you to submit your website and gives you access to Bing’s Webmaster Tools for free.  These tools provide more access to influencing how pages are indexed and how each page is read.  While this method is formal and you might think it helps dramatically, expect a nominal improvement in your site’s indexing pace at best.

Check the Count

If you want to keep an eye out on how many of your pages have been indexed by Yahoo/Bing, you can use Pingler’s Yahoo Indexed Pages Checker to see exactly what Yahoo is displaying to its user through the Bing system.  Perfect for when you know how many pages you have in total, you can easily see if any new pages have been picked up and indexed since the last check; it gives you a better idea of the total percentage of your website that has been indexed.