Slow indexing

hi all,

my site has over 4000 pages most of which have been there for over 8 months. Google has pretty much all of the pages indexed and is very quick to index all the new ones as they get added. yahoo, on the other hand, has only 800 pages indexed at this time. the number of pages indexed is growing extremely slowly (seems to be 20 or so pages per week)

any ideas on how to speed up indexing by yahoo?

thanks,
james

 

is my situation unique or do you guys observe the same with your sites and yahoo?

 

Well there is one way to speed up indexing for definite.. Overture Site Match. That could get costly though

 

If my observation is correct, Yahoo updates its index every 3 months or so. Yahoo doesn't seen to make any rolling update with regard to its size of the index. Generally, Yahoo adds pages more slowly, and also it appears that its index is smaller than Google.

 

I wonder if they have index envy

 

Maybe, maybe not. Google says it has huge index, but I notice that many pages are indexed yet not cached. On other hand, if the page is indexed in Yahoo, it's cached. Also I hate to be judgmental, but there are pages that are totally meaningless.

 

All I know is that due to the difference in their index sizes, I get a lot more visits from G. Yahoo seems to have indexed a lot more pages from our site in the last week. From a few thousand to 20,000. Not a bad increase, about ten times what MSN has indexed, but still almost a tenth of what G has indexed.

I'm of the opinion that index size does matter. The more pages a search engine has in its index, the better comparison it can make for search terms. Just like an airfare search will be better if it can consider more airlines.

 

I agree. More choice equals better quality.

 

Did this take place last week? I always thought that Yahoo updates its index every 3 months or so.

 

Google is so slow for me 8 months, 75 pages indexed I am getting pissed off with it, what can I do!!!

 

Let me ask you this. How many pages does your website have currently?

 

I only noticed it last week.

 

150 static pages 200 dynamic,

currently adding 1 static a day, .5 dynamic.

 

I also noticed today that

site:visitdevonandcornwall.com gives 95 results

site:www.visitdevonandcornwall.com gives 87

are there any duplicate content issues here, are they beeing treated as seperate sites?

Also looking at my indexed sites, few are cached and the description is only " 1. " the description gets no further than the drop down menus, what can i do about that? some help would be greatfuly recived!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Hey Jim Bob,

The reason the first site query gives more results is because it includes the pages that were indexed without the www. in front. You can see the same thing MUCH more pronounced if you compare site:www.yahoo.com compared to site:yahoo.com . Basically, the www is in effect just another subdomain, so when you choose to specify that in your site: command, it will only search results in that subdomain.

That description does seem a little weird. What happens when they show up in normal results (not site: results)? That's what really matters. Also, you should try to make your meta descriptions a little shorter and easier to read; while they are barely used by any search engines for ranking purposes (no important engines at least), they can regularly be used to describe your site in the serps. So what really matters is making it an enticing description, not one stuffed with keywords (use the keywords meta if you must, although that is also largely ignored).

 

Hi

In normal results I still seem to see 1.

Thanks for the description advice, I will tweak them; it is important to use kw in them, isnt it?

 

I don't think it's particularly important to use kw's. None of the major engines (that I know of) actually take it into account when ranking your page. I'd just focus on making them good catchy descriptions, as Google seems to regularly use them for that purpose.

What's the search term you use that shows up a "1" for the description? Usually google does a good job of finding content on the page that matches the search term and building its description around that. If it can't, then it uses the meta description (or so it seems to me).