July 23, 2004

Search giant Yahoo just updated their search inclusion guidelines.

Like any search engine, Yahoo is concerned with quality, relevant results. Their new search inclusion guidelines also reflect that.

Important considerations for inclusion in Yahoo:

    Original and unique content of genuine value
    Pages designed primarily for humans, search engine considerations secondary
    Hyperlinks intended mostly to help people find interesting & related content
    Metadata, including title & description, that describes well the contents of a page
    Good and consistent web design in general

Unfortunately, not all web pages contain information that is valuable to a user. Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called "spam." Yahoo does not want these pages in the index.

What Yahoo Considers Unwanted Spam

Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo does not want include:

    Pages that harm accuracy or the relevance of search results
    Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
    Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
    Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
    Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
    Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
    The use of text that is hidden from the user (invisible text)
    Pages that give the search engine different content (cloaking)
    Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity
    Pages built primarily for the search engines
    Misuse of competitor names
    Multiple sites offering the same content
    Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
    Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Yahoo's Site Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way. As with Yahoo's other guidelines, Yahoo reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to take any and all action it deems appropriate to insure the quality of its index.

Source: Yahoo!

        

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