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.

Getting other sites to link to yours is not enough to see long-term search engine rankings. Your target audience should be able to find the information as quickly and efficiently as possible once they arrive at your site, no matter what page they land on but this is not always that, case as many pages can naturally rank for more than one keyword. So what is the fix? There is no one definite answer but good usability suggests they get to every page within 3 to 5 clicks. If not, you just lost a potential customer.

Search engines, mainly Google, are able to measure whether end users are returning to search results after clicking on a natural listings or staying on a website which is considered a pages click-through popularity.

Other measurements they take into account are:

• Number of time searchers click on links to your site
• how long they stay on site (This can be see in Google Analytics)
• How often searchers return to your site (repeat customers, so to speak!)

If your potential audience repeatedly clicks links from the search results to your site and stays for a decent amount of time (more than a few seconds) your site popularity increases, but only in the slightest bit as this is one small factor that determines PageRank and if the opposite occurs your Rank decreases which means the other guy trying to rank for the same terms can trump you in rankings.

In this case, optimization efforts are more targeted to the end user rather than the search engines to increase rankings.