How to write for Slurp the spider

As the world’s second most popular search tool, Yahoo moves a tremendous amount of traffic and is a very credible alternative to Google. Yahoo receives over 2.76 billion page views per day from hundreds of millions of unique users. It boasts over 157 million registered users enjoying mail, shopping and discussion groups and an increasingly personalized search and news services. For the past two years, Yahoo, Google and MSN have been embroiled in a hard-fought battle for the loyalty of search engine users forcing all three firms into the hyper-evolution we are witnessing today. Over the next three Wednesdays we are going to examine how the Big-3 spiders work, what they look for and how to best prepare your sites for multiple visits from the bots that rank them. Today, we are starting with Yahoo’s bot, SLURP. Read more…

It has been a full year since the infamous Florida Update rewrote Google’s rankings with a massive pre-Christmas purge of previously well placed sites. The update, which caught virtually everyone by surprise is assumed by most to be the introduction of semantic contextualization software added to a variation of the Hilltop Expert Document Algorithm. It took Google about six to eight weeks to re-establish stable listings and they took a savage beating in the SEO press during that period. For a short time it looked like the shift was a failure with spammy sites and “big-box” stores dominating the Top listings but after a while Google’s listings began to make sense again. Read more…

Commercial websites are getting larger. Driven by the rapid evolution of content management systems, shopping carts and e-biz facilitation, and by the increasing sophistication of Internet retailers, “small” business sites averaging 500+ pages have become common.

Some large sites are very well focused and present relatively few problems for SEOs. Most larger sites however list a wide array of products, services and information. The optimization of large retail sites presents multiple issues for SEOs to work through. Achieving product-specific placements for sites featuring numerous products is much more difficult than achieving placements for smaller, more focused sites. Fortunately, good SEOs are good problem solvers and almost every technical problem has a solution. Read more…