Jun
15
Redirecting homepage with mod_rewrite & htaccess
Filed Under SEO, Yahoo | Leave a Comment
It seems that it isn’t just Google where there’s a problem when www and non-www are both accessed separately in a browser, but that it may just be necessary for Yahoo as well.
I just had a site that’s had the same rankings at Yahoo for a LONG time for the homepage lose those rankings altogether at Yahoo, with the homepage dropping way down doing a site: search.
I thought I had non-www redirected to www. on all sites, but the host had moved servers and I can only guess that there was a glitch, that I’d gotten by without it all along, or that there had been a change at Yahoo.
Bottom line: I put mod_rewrite redirection so that it redirects to www. and in no time it’s back ranking exactly where it was, with the homepage showing first when doing a site: search and Yahoo traffic restored to normal for those search terms.
Jun
15
Yahoo cache gone missing? Another update?
Filed Under Yahoo | Leave a Comment
I just noticed a bit of a switch-around with rankings for some keywords, almost like they were before the most current update. When trying to see the cached page to catch the date on them (since some changes had been made), there was no cache available for any of the sites.
I’m wondering if there’s another update on the docket, only a couple of weeks after the last one, or if one has already just happened, slipping up on us quietly. I hope it’s the case that it’s already happened and if so, that it’ll stick.
May
22
When trying out different CMS for Webmaster Woman last summer, none of which is being used, I had to nuke one (Drupal) because it was throwing out Session IDs. It seems that now that’s creating a problem with Yahoo because although they’re usually right on it with picking up new sites and pages and including them in the index, while the new site is getting hit by the crawler, all there is in the index is two “pages” - one of which doesn’t even exist.
I believe it may possibly be a duplicate content issue, since during the time of the test install there was a folder called /search and now Yahoo is showing that with the SessionID (which it hits with the crawler constantly) - with a duplicate of what’s on the current temporary homepage of the site.
I’m not sure if it will make a difference with or withouth the trailing slash for /search/ or /search but I’m putting up another temporary page in a directory I’m creating as
http://www.webmasterwoman.com/search/
That’s returning a 404 but this is also being picked up with a SessionID for the homepage, and returning a 200:
http://www.webmasterwoman.com/?PHPSESSID=7f5131f335eb7c2787a98392a04131d3
I’ll see if it will be picked up with whatever new is put on it for the time being and get rid of that Session ID page being hit daily - which doesn’t even exist, Slurp is just still looking for it.
The site was totally crawled in the past day, par for the course with Yahoo, they’re not asleep on the job. Not that it matters much right now because the site isn’t near ready for a launch, but it’s a challenge to deal with this issue, which I’ve never had to before.
Apr
30
Yahoo! Netrospective
Filed Under Yahoo | Leave a Comment
10 years, 100 memorable moments
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/
I haven’t looked at this page before (though I did print out their 10th birthday free ice cream coupon at Baskin-Robbins many weeks ago), but noticed it today in the drop-down menu on the Yahoo toolbar (which I love and use all day).
There’s a lot of memory going back 10 years, with myself included. When my daughter set up my first computer for me she set Yahoo as my homepage, figuring that I’d be able to find anything I wanted with that as the starting point. It was so then - and still is, to this day.