How do I rank higher in Yahoo? Use an XML Sitemap
Here’s a secret SEO tip of the week: XML Sitemaps work exceedingly well for Yahoo. This doesn’t seem to be well known, at least I can’t find it from casual searches. After paying a ton to be a part of Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro Trusted Feed, we decided to cut loose from that program since it was not paying off in terms of conversions. Subsequently, our rankings went from the first page of results to nonexistent.
This went on for 9 long months. I joined the company in month 8 and asked around if an updated XML sitemap had been submitted to Yahoo. Everyone I talked to seemed to think that the former SEO Analyst had already submitted one. But I couldn’t find any evidence of that, so I submitted an updated one. Results: First page results 93% of the time for the search phrases we target. This occurred over a 4 month period. All from submitting an XML Sitemap and then an updated one 2 months later.
The reason I submitted an updated sitemap was that I discovered that Yahoo was listing web pages from our site that no longer existed. After some digging I realized that the URLs listed in Yahoo had variables that only existed in our old XML sitemap. It was then I had the theory that Yahoo weighed XML sitemap submissions higher. Once I submitted an XML sitemap and saw immediate results I knew my hunch was correct. Yahoo, at least at the time of submission, seemed to almost take the XML sitemap wholehog and apply it to its results.
Your mileage may vary: search engines change their algorithms all the time. What worked in the past 6 months for me may no longer work. Of the three things that affect search engine results:
- What you do to your site
- What your competitors do on their sites
- What the Search Engines do to their algorithms
- of the three, you only control one: what you do to your site. Yahoo just went through another algorithm change, so we’ll have to see if this affects how XML Sitemaps affect Yahoo rankings, but this worked very effectively for me (as you can see from the chart above).
Posted on May 30th, 2008 | By: wangzen | Filed under SEO secrets.
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