July 30th, 2009
Microsoft and Yahoo yesterday announced a 10 year partnership to help each other on the web.
Microsoft will help Yahoo by providing Bing to power Yahoo! Search and a return in revenue generated through Yahoo’s many portals, in return Yahoo will become the “worldwide exclusive relationship sales force” for both companies helping Microsoft with its online sales and promotion.
Im not sure if this is a good thing or not, on the one hand its a shame to see an internet pioneer hang up its search engine boots in favour of the blood money it will get from Microsoft for embedding bing, but then Yahoo is a network going nowhere but downhill, used only by those that have used it since the early days or those that cant figure out how set a new homepage, missing out on the new generations as they flock to cool uncle google for their search needs, the revenue they will make from Microsoft will probably help the name Yahoo! stay in the headlights that little bit longer.
You can read more on the Yahoo! corporate Blog or the special site set-up to answer your questions.
Tags: bing, Microsoft, yahoo, Yahoo! Search
Posted in T'Internet News | No Comments »
February 8th, 2009
Ensuring the information a search engine has on your site is of critical importance. We need to ensure that new content is added into the search engines as quickly as possible, web crawlers visit your site at various intervals, some search engines will allow you to set the rate at which they visit your site, google and ask.com are the two that come to mind, but this still doesnt ensure your new page is added into the index as soon as possible.
The best way I have found is to alert the search engine to an update, you can do this by sending a ping request to the search engine via an api. This api alerts the index that new content is available and to instruct the crawler to visit the site, below are the uri’s of the top search engines sitemap ping api’s
- Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
- Yahoo – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=
- Live.com – http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=
- Ask.com – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
Just append the url with your sitemap location and off you go. I have modified my sites cms to send a request via cURL to the api’s when ever a new page is added or deleted from my site. This ensures search engines are alerted to any changes in my sitemap.
Tags: ask, curl, google, live, SEO, sitemap, yahoo
Posted in SEO, Website Design | No Comments »