Yahoo! Advises on Making the Listings

by Stephen Logan on 22nd February 2010

The first step towards reaching the front page of any search engine’s results – whether it be Yahoo!, Google or Bing – is to make sure pages are being crawled.

In the latest Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog post, Laura Lippay, director of technical marketing for the search engine, explains that there are numerous ways to ensure that content is being listed accurately by the three market leaders.

These include checking cached versions of pages to see whether updates have been crawled yet, as well as conducting domain-specific searches to make sure all content is visible to the search engines.

For webmasters using link building services, the assertion by Ms Lippay that incoming links are among the main ways that search engines find new pages could be of particular interest.

"Search engines crawl the web, indexing pages and following links to find more pages – that’s their job," she writes.

However, reputable link building services are a must, as Yahoo!’s guidelines on Search Content Quality warn that excessive cross-linking between sites is considered "unwanted" in its own rules for inclusion.