The Trouble Behind Yahoo’s Indexing Methods
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.
No wonder I can’t seem to find most of my sites pages under Bing and Yahoo. They need to get it together it hinders our chances of getting traffic
The title is misleading because, even as mentioned within this article, Yahoo doesn’t have an index or spiders that crawl sites anymore. It relies on Microsoft for its search results. Do note that Microsoft doesn’t quite allow Yahoo to use Bing and its resources, entirely.
A demonstration search on both sites, yahoo.com and bing.com yielded some of the same results in the same order, but also some different results in different order and results totally different altogether between Yahoo and Bing for the same search keywords/phrases.
Bing is a very, very, very good search engine. It’s ridiculously fast and accurate and also has established itself for being the best at fighting spam in its results, something Google has continuously failed to do. I find Bing’s web search refreshing and compelling and I really want Bing to uphold the market and rival Google more because its search service is so much better IMO compared to Google. The results are a lot more accurate and its features have set a new standard in web searching.
Yahoo on the other hand is an old and sold out site and service. It also loaded VERY slow for me, both the site and its search/search results. The only thing still going for Yahoo is its news and its web directory, though the price for inclusion within its directory isn’t nearly worth it for the benefits it delivers is honestly next to nothing; it’s just another one-way backlink from a web directory, the only thing separating it is the fact that it’s an authority site, well established, and holds a high Google PageRank. It’s valuable in a sense but it’s not crucial or needed. There are many quality web directories out there that have the same or better PageRank that can offer the same results for a fraction of the cost that Yahoo charges. Yahoo should have just chosen to be a directory search engine and put pressure on webmasters to pay and submit their sites with pricing levels that would affect their results, making the need for sponsored result listings and PPC unnecessary.
The more a search engine spider visits a site, the better, and the longer it stays on crawling and indexing pages, the better as well. It means that its search is constantly being updated and that your site has some importance within its results, and that you’re doing something right; it’s obviously coming back to your site from a series of links.