Yahoo has a tendancy to list index pages of a new site and then take its good ole time coming back to pick up the rest of the pages. There are two ways that I have been experimenting with to get them to pick up my pages faster.

The first way is the have a blog and deep link to the individual pages you want. This could be pretty time consuming if you have tons of pages. I have been linking to my updated tournament site pages from this blog to help Yahoo list my individual pages. So far each time I link to an individual page it is picked up within a day or three. For example the following page is not yet listed in Yahoo.

Rhode Island Soccer Tournaments

So now that I just deep linked to it, it will show up in the next few days based on my past experience.

The next option is to use rss feeds. Blogs and news sites are pretty hot in search engines right now since they like fresh content and most blog software converts the entries to rss feeds which are snapped up quickly. I just converted my tournament entries into a rss feed and added that feed to My Yahoo and My Msn. Any new tournaments I add automatically update my feed and are picked up right away. Saving me from having keep adding new tournaments in my blog manually.

Which option is best? I am not sure of the time frame and which option is better so I am now preforming this test. I have updated a tournament page that currently is not listed in Yahoo. The Minnesota tournament page has been updated and picked up on my rss feed.

Which page will be indexed in Yahoo faster? How long will it take to be picked up? These are questions that I am interested in. I will probably continue to test these theories and see if I can get some consistant data.

Since my site is programmed in PHP I referenced the following information PHP & MySQL : Generating an RSS feed - Presentations & Articles - Bhatt.id.au to program my php/mysql site to build the feeds. It took approximately 5 hours to work it into my programming for two of my sites. If anyone is actually interested in the steps I took to prepare the feed and get it syndicated, drop me a line and I will write an article.

I have had a new directory site up for 6 months and just realized that Yahoo is only listing my home page and I have had no traffic from Yahoo this entire time. Guess I was not paying attention to my logs very well. Google and MSN give me considerable traffic but nada from yahoo.

Guess I am going to have to look up Yahoo SEO tips.

For now I am going to try to deep link to a few of the categories in the site and see if I can give it a jump start.

My directory for my local town. Norwin.biz covers North Huntingdon, Irwin and North Irwin based websites.

For information on Norwin area websites visit:

Norwin area Automotive links
Norwin Area Business to Business Links
Irwin, North Irwin and North Huntingdon Community Websites

Lets see if blogging these links with work for Yahoo.

Just a quick note on the search engine status of my new site. It has been one month and 7 days since I launched my new site. I have been steadily looking for tournaments to add and have been requesting links to the site as time allows. My traffic broke the 200 per day visitor threshold yesterday. People are starting to find us.

MSN is still leading the pack of referrals with 63% of the search engine traffic. All pages of the site have been listed.

Yahoo is starting to catch up with 29% of the search engine traffic. They still don’t list all my pages. Deep linking is clearly the key to getting the pages indexed quicker. Below I will list a few more pages that are not yet listed and in a few days voila they are listed. Blogs are the way to go……..

Google is an out of the park third with only 3% of my search traffic. The only keywords that work are individual tournament names. The sitemap is spidered frequently and the pages are updated in cache frequently. This has taught me to change my search habits. I no longer rely only on google for search results. You are missing out on lots of newer sites that need to sit in the sandbox for an extended time before you will find it in Google. With the multitude of new sites created every day, you could really be missing out.

AOL search comes in 4th with 1%
DMOZ, 5th with .07%
Altavista and Dogpile tied for 6th with .03%

Below are some of the soccer tournament pages that are currently not listed in Yahoo:

Hawaii Soccer Tournaments
Idaho Soccer Tournaments
Iowa Soccer Tournaments
Kentucky Soccer Tournaments
Louisiana Soccer Tournaments
Maine Soccer Tournaments
Massachusetts Soccer Tournaments
Minnesota Soccer Tournaments
Missouri Soccer Tournaments

Announcing tournament updates for the following 2005 tournaments:

Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Wisconsin

Hope everyone had a safe and happy 4th of July holiday…….

Today we have updated the Youth Soccer Tournament Database with new tournament listings:

2005 Soccer Tournaments

Alaska
Arizona
South Carolina

2006 Soccer Tournaments

Arizona

Good luck to all the PA West area teams that are competing in the Region 1 Championships…….