YahooSlurp makes its debut

What a surprise! Yahoohas unveiled its own search engine crawler, YahooSlurp. This move certainly surprised many of us who thought for sure Yahoo would adopt the results from Inktomi's database after announcing last month that it will cease displaying Google results by the end of quarter one.

The debut of YahooSlurp proved us, and many others, wrong in that prediction. Clearly, the developers at Yahoo have been busy working on the new YahooSlurp spider and ranking algorithm. The big debut came on Wednesday (Feb. 18th) and packed a punch in the on-going sparring match between Google, Yahoo and MSN, the top three contenders for the title of most important search engine.

For a long time, optimizing for Google was at the forefront of many seo campaigns. Achieving high positioning on Google was the way to increase the amount of targeted web site traffic and reap the rewards. That theory started to become modified with the increase of Inktomi's database being used for search results, primarily on MSN. To achieve high search engine positioning it became important to keep both Google and Inktomi in mind. Now we add YahooSlurp to the mix.

While it's still early to see what factors influence ranking on the new Yahoo, there are a few helpful hints posted on their FAQ page that are important:

• Yahoo! Slurp follows HREF links but it does not follow SRC links. This means that Yahoo! Slurp does not retrieve or index individual frames referred to by SRC links.
• While YahooSlurp can follow dynamic links, webmasters are advised to post static html pages that include HREF text links to specific sections of the appropriate dynamic pages.
• Yahoo! Slurp will obey the first entry in the robots.txt file

If your site uses frames, be sure to include proper use of the <no script> tag! Also, it's clear that a site map continues to be a must-have if you want your site to be crawled especially for dynamic and content-management sites.

We'll continue to keep watch and stay tuned for further details on YahooSlurp! Meanwhile, the search engine war continues to wage on.

Read Yahoo's Press Release