Yahoo! Local Adds a Circle to Mark the Spot

The Yahoo! Local team had that in mind when they rolled out a new feature to help everyone from the consummate explorer to the geographically-challenged find local businesses quicker and more easily. Now, you can make refinements to your local queries in real-time, directly on the map, based on a specific geographic radius.

Link:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000535.html

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0

Over the past few weeks, we've [Yahoo!] been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.

As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you'll see the following changes:

a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it'll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain.

b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, 'Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.'

Link:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000531.html

3 places to get answers

Askville

Yahoo! Answers

Live QnA

Webmaster tools from search engines gives valuable information

If you've never signed up for the various webmaster accounts at the major search engines (Google, Live Search, Yahoo!) then you're missing out on a lot of very valuable information on your website. These are great tools to help increase your position within the various search engines.

Where to find:

• Google Webmaster - Help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - Allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page
• Live Search Webmaster - Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view

Veign on Yahoo Local Live

Veign is now on Yahoo Local Live. Who cares, right? Correct, but posting here will get the page into Google's index faster.

Google PageRank and Backlinks Checker

I wasn't sure I was going to post about this but what the heck, I post about everything else. Another tool from Veign that can give you a compact report of Google Pagerank and backlinks from various search engines in a single report. The reason I wasn't going to post about it is because its more of a tool for my needs and not sure if anyone else would even care to know about it. For now its limited to a mazimum of 10 URLs but may expand if my needs exceed 10 or I hear enough comments that request more.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/tools/pagerank/

Yahoo! hits the mark for SEO with its robots-nocontent attribute

Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections, repeated boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic content that is useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters can apply the "robots-nocontent" attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class="robots-nocontent" present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others.

This is a great idea from Yahoo! as it means that web designers (and SEO companies) can better identify to the crawlers what are the actual content of the page and not just supporting content (like navigation menus). I think this could have a huge impact on the results displayed in Yahoo!, especially for those who implement the new attribute. Veign has, have you?

Link:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html

Blog post from Yahoo!:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html

Yahoo! Widgets releases version 4.0

Yahoo! Widgets help you save time and stay current by bringing an always-updated, at-a-glance view of your favorite Internet services right to your desktop.

The Yahoo! Widget Gallery offers over 4,000 desktop Widgets - the most available anywhere online. Yahoo! Widgets is the only major desktop Widgets platform that works on both Windows and Mac OSes.

Link:
http://widgets.yahoo.com

Google and Yahoo both offer free AJAX UI code

Did you know that both Google and Yahoo are offering free libraries for making AJAX type interactive websites?

Google Web ToolKit:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Yahoo! UI Library (YUI):
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

Big kudos on YUI as the samples and ease of use is quite impressive

They have come a long way, a quick look back

A quick look back to some websites humble beginnings;

Yahoo! - 1996


Yahoo! - Now


Google - 1998


Google - Now


Download.com - 1997


Download.com - Now


Veign - 2001


Veign - 2003

Veign - Now