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An Update on Yahoo Sitemaps Optimization
November 06, 2006
Reaction to my recent post on optimizing Yahoo sitemaps has been mixed, ranging from "that's amazing" to "you're crazy and your testing methods are shoddy - that will never work!" (thanks for writing, Mom). So I'm trying to take an honest look at the actual probability that Yahoo is able to pull (and subsequently index) URLs found in a Google-style sitemaps file.
The original site I referred to in the post is still showing signs of increased indexing from Yahoo, and the sitemap file I've told Yahoo to use is the same sitemap.xml that I created for Google.
This alone, obviously, does not prove that Yahoo is pulling URLs from the sitemap.xml file. In addition, there are a few other reasons to be skeptical:
- About a month ago, in the YSE forum, the Yahoo rep ("Mr. Slurp") said flat-out, "we currently do not support Google's sitemaps protocol."
But does that mean that Yahoo can't even open the file, or merely that it doesn't recognize and work with the various tags within the file, such as <.lastmod>, <.changefreq>, <.priority>, etc.?
- Following on that point, on the feed submission page, Yahoo says "For any URL (directly submitted or obtained from a feed) our crawler will extract links and find pages we have not discovered already. We will automatically detect updates on pages and remove dead links on an ongoing basis."
So should this statement not apply to URLs such as www.site.com/sitemap.xml?
- When I submitted the sitemap file to Yahoo, it was "processed" within an hour of uploading and gave no indication of error or incompatibility.
But why should I expect such an error message? Sometimes all you get is an error if the page throws a 404, but little more.
I am currently running some tests that should prove definitively whether Yahoo can (and will) extract URLs from an xml sitemap. It could take a few weeks, but I'll certainly share my results here.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at November 6, 2006 11:49 PM
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Comments
another simple way to see if your page is indexed or
not is to get the gadget from http://www.roinfosearch.com/webdesign/indexedpage.html
Posted by: andrei at September 26, 2007 12:35 PM