Getting your site on Live Search and Yahoo!
So far I have been only working on getting my site being listed at Google. I had a look at my Google Analytics stats today and saw that 100% of the traffic generated through search engines comes from Google. So I asked myself - maybe there are other search engines out there that should link to my site as well? I personally never use a different search engine than Google so the first difficulty was to find out, what other search engines I could have a look at.
Of course I knew that there was some search service offered by Microsoft and of course I knew that there was Yahoo out there. But here’s the funny thing: the result pages of Yahoo’s search site look so similiar to Google that in fact I thought they were using a rebranded Google service. But that’s not the case… So first I head a look at whether my site is listed in Yahoo or not. Shock! It doesn’t seem to be… or at least when I tried popular search terms that give me high ranks with Google my site never showed up at the front. Time for submitting my site to Yahoo!.
I clicked on their link where it says Submit Website and was overwhelmed by all the different options. Next surprise: you can pay for your site being listed at Yahoo! Of course I don’t want to do this, so I guess Submit Your Site for Free is the best alternative. I chose to submit a site feed (my SML sitemap) and had to sign up for a Yahoo ID… At least the sign up form was very web 2.0 with a lot of Ajax an fancy stuff.
Ok, once signed up and everything you get to the Yahoo Site Explorer, which is basically the same as Google’s Webmaster Tools just for the Yahoo search engine. To be honest I think the design is a little bit more professional than Google’s, but there is not as much functionality. Here is what I did so far:
- I verified my site (using a Meta-Tag)
- I added my sitemap as feed
- I checked the statistics: currently 0 pages from my blog are indexed by Yahoo
- I deleted some old blog entries using the Delete URL feature
Deleting sites is called “Site actions” and you are restricted to 25 actions per website. I don’t know whether just for the moment, or forever, but currently I only have 21 delete requests left. So much for Yahoo… I then moved on to try the search engine of Microsoft. First I had to find out that this is called Live Search nowadays. There is a link for webmasters on their site as well and it gets you to the Webmaster Center. Again, this is very similiar to Google and Yahoo, but much less functionality and the design is really outdated as well. Here is what I did at Live Search:
- I verified my site using the XML file method - they check the verification every time, so if you don’t want to have the annoying Meta Tag in your HTML code all the time I recommend using the XML file
- I added my sitemap
That’s it. Really nothing more that you can do. One interesting thing is the so called “Page Score”. I assume it’s something similiar to Google’s pagerank, but I ranked really high: 4 out of 5. I don’t know whether this is something to be happy about, or something that makes me wonder, how on earth MS calculates this score…