Yahoo Search Subtly Nudges Webmasters

One of biggest thorns in the side of all search engines is non-relevant search results. Whether the cause of these types of results are spammers or webmasters who aren't conscientious enough to check their work, poor SERPs can damage the reputation of search engine almost irrevocably (who, exactly, would want to use an engine that gives irrelevant results?). The big four have taken various steps to address this, which usually consists of various webmaster guidelines and FAQs. However, Yahoo Search is trying a different approach. On the We try our best to crawl and find the best unique content on webmaster’s sites. However, any help that webmasters can give in terms of hints and directives to prevent the crawler from crawling duplicate pages or crawler traps is welcome. In other words, Yahoo wants webmasters to take an active role in preventing Slurp traps. Putting the appropriate commands in your site's robot.txt file will also help them keep their SERPs relatively clean, which is something that benefits all search engine users. Chris Richardson Staff Writer | Murdok Blog