A question by XcellenceIT: Does Yahoo! search engine matter any more?

[Cratima]

XcellenceIT team has a question and I decided I should help them by posting the question. Here goes:
Everybody knows that Google is a leader in search engines. But Yahoo! search engine comes right behind him.
Besides my natural question: since all my acquaintances use Google, who are those using Yahoo! search engine after all? , I have another question:
Is it worth it putting efforts in improving for Yahoo! search engine? Google has Sitemaps, Yahoo! has Site Explorer, but is it worth the time to have your web site inserted in both?
OK, you have to make your web site as much W3C-friendly as you can. But Yahoo! search engine friendly?

Frankly, I don't think it's worth the time, but I'm looking for a second opinion.

Any feed-back on this will be greatly appreciated.

[fisicx]

Yahoo! search engine friendly?

If you read the Yahoo guidelines and live search guidelines you will see they are very simialr to the google guidelines. In other words, if you have optimised your site for google you don't need to do anything different to get listed on the others.

[Cratima]

Yes, I'm sure in theory they all want the same thing.

The problem is that the search engines "scan" your web site differently.

So there are some actual differences between search engines.

[fisicx]

The problem is that the search engines "scan" your web site differently.

How do you know?

There are different robots for different parts of the page but they all read the same information. How they then rank the page depends on their indexing criteria - and that's a trade secret - there are a few clues but nobody knows for certain.

[TWD-Tony]

As Fisicx says.... If you make your site accessible to search engine robots (spiders) then they will read and read and read, what they actually do with that info is upto them...

There isn't really any secrets in optimizing "for google" or "for Yahoo!" - just to optimize for accessibility and crawlability.

On a side note: Is crawlability a word - maybe i've just invented it! WOW - I've created a new word

[squalid]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourc...q=crawlability

On a side note: Is crawlability a word - maybe i've just invented it! WOW - I've created a new word

i think you may be too late to claim ownership of that word