Say good-bye to Yahoo Site Explorer. The essential tool for webmasters looking to optimize for the Yahoo search engine seems to have become redundant. Both Microsoft and Yahoo stated that YSE will be shut down later this year, and encouraged switching to Microsoft Webmaster Tools.
In a post on Yahoo's search blog, Herman Minocha, the product manager for Yahoo Site Explorer, acknowledged that a year ago his company said that they would continue to support and extend the service, even after completing the transition to Mhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gificrosoft-powered searches. However, after input from users and the team from Bing Webmaster Central, the companies realized that “Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value,” Minocha noted.
So when, exactly, will this shutdown take place? Minocha says that it will happen “once all markets are transitioned” to the the Microsoft Search platform. He gives no more specific date than “later this year,” but notes that the search blog will continue to update readers on the status of the transition...Read More..
In the meantime, Minocha says that webmasters should start using Bing Webmaster Center, but they don't need to stop using Yahoo Site Explorer just yet. “In a large part of the world, we have not yet transitioned” to the Microsoft search platform, Minocha explained, so “to continue to receive relevant organic traffic from Yahoo! Search results, we encourage you to continue using Site Explorer as you have in the past until we fully switch over.”
If you didn't see the writing on the wall for the Yahoo search engine, this is the clearest indication yet that it will cease to have a separate existence. In fact, Minocha explicitly states that webmasters will not need to optimize separately for the Yahoo and Bing search engines in the future. That will happen as soon as this year, when Yahoo's organic results are completely powered by Bing in all parts of the world.
While this event will simplify search engine optimization for many people, it's hard to see Yahoo fade away without mixed feelings. Much older than Bing, and several years older than Google, Yahoo stayed relevant as a search site much longer than earlier entries to the field, such as Excite, Lycos, and even Ask. Once the transition to Bing-powered results is complete, will the combined Microsoft-Yahoo search engine become a stronger competitor to Google, or will the combination simply fall victim to the search behemoth's competitive strength as so many others have before? There's no telling, but even if it does, Yahoo will probably continue to exist as a source of news and various information, as its associated sites and services still see a huge amount of traffic.
If you're using the Site Explorer APIs, your extensions are running out. Yahoo had intended to shut those down at the end of last year, but extended the deadline. Those will now be closed on September 15, 2011. The old BOSS Site Explorer APIs shut down yesterday, but there's good news, according to a recent Yahoo blog post; apparently, there's a new BOSS in town, BOSS V2, which you can explore here.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
URL parameters
Google’s goal is to crawl your site as efficiently as possible. Crawling and indexing pages with identical content is an inefficient use of our resources. It can limit the number of pages we can crawl on your site, and duplicate content in our index can hinder your pages' performance in our search results. Duplicate content often occurs when sites make the same content available via different URLs—for example, by using session IDs or other parameters, like this:
http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses/green.htm
http://www.example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=green
http://example.com/shop/index.php?product_id=32&highlight=green+dress&cat_id=1&sessionid=123&affid=431
In this case, all these URLs point to the same content: a collection of real green dresses.
When Google detects duplicate content, such as variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster and select what we think is thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.
To improve this process, we recommend using the parameter handling tool to give Google information about how to handle URLs containing specific parameters. We'll do our best to take this information into account; however, there may be cases when the provided suggestions may do more harm than good for a site. Read More....
http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses/green.htm
http://www.example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=green
http://example.com/shop/index.php?product_id=32&highlight=green+dress&cat_id=1&sessionid=123&affid=431
In this case, all these URLs point to the same content: a collection of real green dresses.
When Google detects duplicate content, such as variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster and select what we think is thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.
To improve this process, we recommend using the parameter handling tool to give Google information about how to handle URLs containing specific parameters. We'll do our best to take this information into account; however, there may be cases when the provided suggestions may do more harm than good for a site. Read More....
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