Pages Yahoo! Wants Included in its Index
Pages Yahoo! Wants Included in its Index:
- Original and unique content of genuine value
- Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
- Links intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
- Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
- Good web design in general
Unfortunately, not all web pages contain information that is valuable to a user. Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called “spam.” Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index.
What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted:
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of content that Yahoo! does not want include:
- Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
- Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page (doorway pages)
- Multiple sites or pages offering substantially the same content
- Pages that rely heavily on content or links to content created for another web site, such as affiliate content
- Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
- Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value (cookie-cutter pages)
- Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
- The use of text or links hidden from the user
- Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end user sees (cloaking)
- Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity (link schemes)
- Pages built primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords
- Misuse or inaccurate use of competitor or brand names
- Sites that use excessive pop-ups, install malware (i.e. spyware, viruses, trojans), or interfering with user navigation
- Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor-quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way. As with Yahoo!’s other guidelines, Yahoo! reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to take any and all action it deems appropriate to ensure the quality of its index.
