Yahoo Search Engine
The Yahoo search engine submission service can be used to submit your site for free, though building links is best.
History
The history of the Yahoo search engine is short. in 2002 Yahoo acquired Inktomi, a provider of search engine software which had been around since 1998. Inktomi software had been incorporated into HotBot, which displaced AltaVista as the leading web-crawler-based search engine. HotBot was in turn displaced by Google. At this time, Yahoo was using Google to provide its search results. After the Inktomi acquisition the way was clear for developing its own search engine. But, in the end, Yahoo did not use Inktomi search software. Having hired many search engineers, it developed a brand new search engine.
In 2003 Yahoo stopped using the Google search engine to provide its index and ranking mechanisms. Also in 2003, Yahoo acquired the Overture directory and the AltaVista and AllTheWeb search engines. But Yahoo allowed AltaVista and AllTheWeb to maintain independent indexes.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
In 2004 Mike Grehan interviewed Jon Glick1, Yahoo's Senior Manager for Web Search. He was one of the team that had access to AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi technologies. These were used to inspire the development of the current Yahoo search engine. They found AllTheWeb was good at rebuilding indexes, Alta Vista was good at judging relevancy, and Inktomi has much to offer in several areas.
Of course, taking on Google was the main thing, and the Yahoo team spotted a problem with the Google PageRank technology. As Grehan says says, "PageRank is a keyword independent algorithm i.e. you already have your score before the user has even keyed in a search phrase. Whereas, an algorithm like the one developed by Jon Kleinberg [HITS] is keyword dependant... Yahoo! Search deploys ... a [more]keyword dependent algorithm."
Yahoo are looking closely at personalised search. Glick suggests that if you search travel sites for "China", other current searches should be biased to the country and not China dishes.
Yahoo index the meta description tag, and counts similar to body text. It's also a fallback if there's no text to extract to show to users. The meta keywords tag went wrong because it was heavily spammed. But if you have a product which is frequently misspelled, or if you're located in one community, but do business in several surrounding communities, having the community names or alternate spellings in the meta keywords tag means the page is a candidate to show up. It will not get any rank, but at least it's considered and may show up as a Google whack or similar. It's only for matching and not ranking. Its best to stick to a few keywords separated by commas. And not many of them - about twelve should be the upper limit. The following is fine according to Glick: ‘laptop computers, desktop computers, palm computers'
As far as the title goes, Glick says "we'll only display 60 characters. You don't want to go past that because you don't want dot, dot, dot at the end of your title."
Glick doesn't like affiliate links, or "affiliate Spam" as he calls it. This is where three hundred people offer the same service. He doesn't want to show the same information three hundred times, in fact once is enough. The moral is create your own product, or at least have an original way to sell someone else's.
Submission service
If you already have a website then you may find that Yahoo is already indexing your pages. Yahoo's web crawler may have accessed your pages via links from other websites. If not, you can use the Yahoo search engine submission service to submit your site. You should also do all you can to get high quality links. You should add every page you want indexed to the Yahoo search engine submission service. The spider's cannot be trusted to crawl through your site given one URL.
References
[1] Mike Grehan "E-Marketing News", 2004