Putting spiders to work for you with Yahoo! Search Submit

We’ve talked about Yahoo! Search Submit in general terms before. It’s a fast and relatively cheap way to help your site get better exposure in Yahoo! “organic” search results. Today we offer a glimpse into how Search Submit works and how it can benefit certain publishers and e-commerce site owners.

Not-so-Creepy Crawlies
A Web spider is an automated script that methodically crawls the World Wide Web locating sites for display in search results. It would be virtually impossible to know what is on the Web moment-to-moment without this tool to scan for relevant sites. On the other hand, the extremely dynamic nature of the Web poses a problem for Web spiders, which slowly index the latest updates to the millions of sites on the Web.

Search Submit is for those seeking to increase their site’s chances of displaying in non-sponsored (algorithmic) search results. It also can help your most pertinent URLs get displayed in response to a search related to your site content. Search Submit comes in two flavors, Basic and Pro, with the Pro version offering the advantage of providing greater control over the way your listings are presented, helping to raise your “click appeal.”

Compare the standard Web spider search engine refresh rates of every two to six weeks with Search Submit’s search engine site updates of every 48 hours. Even if your site is updated infrequently, you may still want to think about Search Submit should any of the following apply to you:

• Your site is not optimized for Web spiders. Many Web spiders have difficulty indexing sites containing rich media or framed pages.
• Your site contains several pages detailing product or other inventory. A searcher entering keywords related to your products may not see your product pages in search results if the spider has not indexed your latest additions.
• Your site contains seasonal offers. Often these special offers need to be made available to searchers more frequently to take advantage of a particular timeframe.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

The Big Apple’s the Place to Be

“No one should come to live in New York unless he is willing to be lucky.”—E.B. White

I’ve been captivated by E.B. White’s 1939 classic, Here is New York since reading it many years ago for a class in journalism school. It is a portrait and a paean to “Noo Yawk City” so compelling that one is obliged to follow White non-stop through his marathon-length amble around the greatest city in the world.

If you happen to be in the city that, as White put it, brings “to a single compact area the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant,” next week, you’ll surely want a little time to wander. But few ever go to New York without a purpose. If you’re reading this blog and are planning to be in New York next week, chances are you’re going for the Search Engine Strategies New York 2007 conference, to be held Tuesday, April 10 through Friday, April 13.

While you’re strolling around the exhibit hall, you’ll definitely want to saunter up to booth #2400. Yes, that’s the Yahoo! booth, where our dedicated Yahoos will be on hand to answer your questions, hand out schwag and generally make things pleasant and informative.

In addition, you’ll want to catch these Yahoo! panels, which will be informative and get you off your feet.

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Hopefully, one day phishing will be gone; until then, beware
 

All you need to do is wire a few hundred bucks to the office of the finance minister of the tiny nation of Twitbuktu, located on the border between Bikini Atoll and Denmark, and email him your bank account number, date of birth and mother’s maiden name, and a few days later a million dollars or more will materialize into your bank account like manna from heaven. 

Right. And if pigs twirl their tails fast enough, they can fly.

By now we’re all pretty familiar with email scams, those too-good-to-be-true offers that multiply like romance-happy gerbils in your inbox. Most of them are pretty easy to spot, even to the untrained eye.

Scam I am
But what should you do if you got what looked like a legitimate email from Yahoo!—or from a business that claimed to be affiliated with us—asking for personal or account details such as a password or credit card info?

Don’t respond to it.

Neither Yahoo!, nor any business we are affiliated with, will ever send you an email or call you proactively asking you for contact, account or other financial information. If you do get such an email or call, it likely comes from a crook who is “phishing” for your information in order to bilk you of your hard-earned cash.

If you think you’ve been “phished” for info, please let us know by emailing phishing(at)cc.yahoo-inc.com, or forward the email in question to the same address.

To learn more about how you can keep from getting reeled in by “phishermen,” and how to guard against other Internet-based scams, visit these resources:

• Common Abuse Issues
• Yahoo! Security Center

—Michael Mattis

Yahoo! offers a turn of the dreidel for the Festival of Lights

As the calendar year quietly draws to its close, people naturally turn to friends and family to help them celebrate their successes of the past year and help prepare them for the challenges to come—and in the process eat, drink and laugh a lot.

Today is the first day of Chanukah. Over the next eight days, families will gather to light candles, exchange gifts, munch tasty nosh and offer blessings. All of us at Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Chanukah. 

—The Team

Interactive: How five lives were changed, five years after »  Full coverage »