How Yahoo's phrased based indexing affects your website rankings

Search engine spiders are becoming more intelligent. It was possible to fool search engines with a simply meta keywords tag some years ago, but search engines have now a deeper understanding of the contents of a web page.

Yahoo recently published a patent applications that gives some insight on how Yahoo finds and evaluates keyword phrases on web pages.

What's the new patent all about?

The patent application explains how Yahoo parses web pages to find related keyword phrases. Yahoo breaks down the content of web pages into several possible phrases and matches them with a content dictionary.

Yahoo also seems to consider searches and query refinements to determine the topic of a search query. For example, Yahoo might monitor a users queries and find out that the terms "woods", "club" and "green" appear during a given query session.

The patent application also contains a lot of information about how Yahoo might work with the gathered information.

What is the essential point of the patent application?

The patent application indicates that Yahoo tries to understand concepts instead of single words. For example, someone looking for "tiger woods" isn't just searching for web pages that contain this word combination.

If a page contains the phrase "tiger woods" as well as some related keywords such as "golf", "green" and "clubs" then it is more likely a match for a search for "tiger woods" than a web page that has a story about a tiger in the woods that threatened a boy with the name Mowgli that doesn't contain the related keywords.

What does this mean for your website rankings?

When writing web pages, it can be helpful to use related keywords on a web page that has been optimized for a certain keyword. That will make it easier for search engines to understand the content of the keywords that you use on your web pages.

According to the patent application, it seems to help to use these related keywords close together on a page to make it easier for search engines to find the relation.

It will probably also help to optimize different pages of your web page for different but related search terms. That way, you can show search engines that your website is relevant to a special topic.

Using different but related keywords on different pages of your website to make your website more relevant for a special topic has already been recommended in the IBP manual (zipped PDF file).

The manual also contains information on how to optimize your web pages so that they are best prepared for high rankings on Yahoo, Google and other major search engines. It is a good read if you want to optimize your web page for high rankings.

2. Search engine news of the week

January 2008 U.S. search engine rankings "In January, Google Sites marginally extended its share of core searches to 58.5 percent. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.5 percent). [...] Americans conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing an 8.9 percent gain versus December. Google Sites saw 6.1 billion core searches during the month, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.3 billion." Related: Google takes UK's top brand spot Yahoo announces launch of Yahoo! Buzz "Yahoo said that Yahoo! Buzz would open up the Internet's starting point by uncovering the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the Internet and bringing more buzz-worthy stories to its homepage." Google updates its display URL policy for AdWords "We have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st." Search engine newslets MSN Search and Ask audience profile. Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner. EU: search engines under EU rules. Google to store patients' health records. Will Google acquire a Ukrainian web portal? Ask.com adds Compete stats to its search results. Personalized search is still the holy grail. Google’s annual report by the charts. Google Mapspam takes on international flavor.

3. Articles of the week

How vulnerable is Google on search? "I think Google is vulnerable in search. Google hasn't changed search in 7 or 8 years, they are fat and happy. There are so many ways search can be improved. Google is way too locked into Larry and Sergey's original vision, which has hardly changed at all; it's not the only canonical way to do search. There's so many ways to granulate search and make it conditional and do a much better job." Gates explains why Microsoft needs Yahoo "Gates spoke to CNET News.com on Tuesday about how Microsoft needs Yahoo's engineering talent, how Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse less essential, though far from obsolete, and what journalism will look like in the future." Related: Yahoo plays it safe, for now, Can Microsoft use AltaVista without buying Yahoo?, Microsoft president on Micro-Hoo: we can do it Search Engines: intense competition drives better user experiences "In the December 2007 Keynote study, Google makes a clean sweep of first place in all four key index rankings: Overall Customer Experience, Brand Impact, Future Usage Impact, and Customer Satisfaction. Yahoo! takes second place in every category, and Ask.com, MSN, and AOL follow in order."