Yahoo! Submissions

• Mar. 1, 2004

You gotta love webmaster forums. While they can be a double edged sword in that sometimes you get contradictory information, from time to time you find tidbits of gold which make your life easier.

I am referring to a post in the WebmasterWorld forums by an apparent Yahoo! employee regarding how sites can get into the new Yahoo!

Last week we brought you the potential paid options for getting indexed in Yahoo! but we didn't speculate too much on if there would be a free submission. In fact we said they could use "the Altavista model whereby you could submit for free with no guarantee of when or even if your site would be crawled or you could pay to get guaranteed indexing."

Well it appears that that will be the case for a free submission. Just like submitting to Altavista or Alltheweb now, whereby you submit a code of characters along with each URL to get indexed. But there are no guarantees with this type of submission when or even if the site were to get indexed.

On the flip side is the feed program we speculated on where a site can submit much like Inktomi's Index Connect. Again there is no guarantee of rankings only a guarantee of indexing. But they will offer reporting, much like Inktomi did on performance (i.e. clicks).

So while this is good news for those who can't afford a huge submission fee it could become a burden for some. I say burden because a few years ago, when Altavista was the big boy, there were times when it seemed that hardly any free submissions were accepted, or if they were it was months before the sites got indexed. I would hope that Yahoo! doesn't go down this path. Sure we could probably accept a bit of delay between submission and indexing, but not months and months like Altavista was doing.

Currently with Google, we see new sites getting indexed within a couple weeks of submission; even sooner if you offer a back link from an existing site to the new site. This way you don't need to submit as Google will find the site on its own (which it prefers to do) and will likely index it faster than submitting.

We'd like to see Yahoo! continue this by offering quick turn around on all submissions, not just the paid ones. Let's face it, at least for the short term people will be comparing Yahoo! search to Google search. If Google submission has quicker results, it will be a mark against Yahoo! Yahoo! will need to be at least as quick as Google. In fact, if they are quicker to index new sites, it could be a feather in their cap.

So while we wait for this new free submission (supposedly to debut this week) we will continue to do the obvious - compare Yahoo! results to Google and see how they are doing.

In my opinion, Yahoo! came out of the gate pretty strongly. The new index, while lacking in some areas, is generally pretty good. Remember this is essentially version 1 from our point of view. It will get better and more relevant as time goes on. I do believe that they have set the bar for "new" rivals (such as the impending MSN Search).

Until then, however, we will wait for free submit in Yahoo! and explore in more detail how the feed submit will work.

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Enquiro.com