I came across an interesting way Yahoo pulls results that doesn’t seem to be accurate. The company I’m currently working with, Sona MedSpa, which offers laser hair removal, botox treatments and body contouring had some necessary cleanup issues I was faced with. Before I begin, notice the services Sona offers.

After doing a few searches, I found the below description shows up for the brand, sona medspa.

Ok, does that seem to match Sona’s services? They do have a center in Dallas but sure don’t offer Hair Cuts!!. I did some investigation and read up on how yahoo pulls search results. There was an area in their FAQ’s that stated many of the results are pulled from The Open Directory and the Yahoo Directory . I did searches and they didn’t show up which continued the confusion.

Yahoo suggested adding these two tags to prevent pulling from those sources.

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

After a few days, nothing again.  Now I know it takes weeks for a page to be spidered but I was ancy so I contacted Yahoo to see if this was a potential fix. I got a response back from a guy/girl named “Sky”, (yes, I laughed too!) that stated the info was being pulled from Idearc.com which is the parent company of YellowPages.com. Sky suggested I contact YellowPages to updated the listing.I then did a search there and nothing came up again.

Frustration insued and I contacted “Sky” again to inquire why Yahoo pulls results rather than spider and index the page directly. I got an email back this morning stating that an engineer researched the case further and determined the below response:

Hello Dan,

Thanks for writing to the Yahoo! Search and Directory Support.

I apologize for the delay. Our engineers have investigated this matter and we’re getting this information from a company called PositionTech which works together with Idearc. According to our engineers, Idearc needs to contact PositionTech to have this information corrected. The feed in question is called “Idearc_Local_Aggregate__Feed”. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you again for writing to the Yahoo! Search and Directory Support.

Regards,

Sky

Search & Directory Support

Yahoo! Inc

Ok, so I found that PositionTech.com is a search marketing firm that works with YellowPages. Again I thought about it and realized why would Yahoo be doing this. I emailed sky back to have it corrected and again asked why Yahoo woukld be doing this rather than going to the site directly. I’m stil waiting on a response but this situation reconfirms my distaste for Yahoo and their practices. I plan on following up as soon as “Sky” looks int the matter.

SEO is synonymous with ranking on the first SERP page in Google. Optimizing a site for Google means getting links, many links, no matter what. Defining and redefining SEO will not change the way these people perceive it. This is not an article for them. Those webmasters who optimize solely for Google are basically targeting only 70% of the search engine market, and disregarding the rest.

This is for those who have heard of social networking but don’t exactly know how it applies to SEO and want to use all possible SEO channels to drive more traffic and to gain more customers. This article will prove what “real” SEO value is to be expected from services like Twitter.

Does twitter Pass Any Link Juice?

Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its “SEO value” has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google’s SERPs. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

According to compete.com, Ask.com owns about 2.5% of the search engine market share. The same source shows that in November 2008 there were 255 million search queries on Ask.com. This is nothing compared to 7235 millions on Google, but can you seriously disregard a source of such traffic? Ask.com is a potential gate for visitors that could convert into customers.

So let’s ask the question again, shall we? Does Twitter pass any link juice? For Ask.com it does.

Do tinyURL Shortened URLs Have SEO Value?

The short answer is yes. TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead. The problem with Twitter, as we already discussed, is the “nofollow” attribute added to all submitted links.

Are There Any Other Possible SEO Advantages with Twitter?

As I already said, SEO is not only about building links. Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. “Creating” is “onsite SEO.” “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”

Every time you submit your site to a directory you “promote it” – meaning that you do “offsite SEO.” Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web a gate to your site is being opened. People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.

When visitors land on a page from an exterior link some other metrics are affected: number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on site. These metrics matter for the search engines more and more; since all other variables are so easily gamed (links and keywords are all subject to spam and black hat SEO strategies).

To make a long story short: although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss.