How Does a Yahoo Bot See My Site?
Search engines such as Yahoo are one way to direct traffic to your website. After adding your website, the search engine will periodically use robots, also known as spiders, to scan your website for new content. Yahoo's bot sees both the content of your website as well as the code, which helps the robot determine significance of aspects of your website.
Other People Are Reading
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Background
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Yahoo! and other search engines send tiny programs, known as bots or robots, to explore the content on the Internet and add it to the indexes. When a bot crawls your site, new pages become part of Yahoo's search index, allowing new or updated content to appear when visitors search for keywords relevant to your website. Search engine bots view websites differently than humans.
Significance
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Because Yahoo's robots are not capable of seeing the website as a human, the bots may not see all elements on your website. If you want Yahoo to index certain content, you may have to find a solution that does not use JavaScript or other methods that the bots cannot see. For example, you may also use a no script tag for the bots.
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Elements Bots Don't See
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One of the most significant elements of your website that Yahoo's bots will not see is JavaScript. Therefore, any element that is JavaScript-generated will not appear to Yahoo. For example, rotating images, links or banners may not appear to the robot and Yahoo may not see that you are linking to those sites when using JavaScript. Furthermore, the robots will not correctly process any links or images that use relative locations. For example, you can make images appear by linking to "/image.gif" if your page is in the same directory as the image. However, the bots will not see images that do not use absolute paths such as "http://domain.com/image.gif".
Content Humans Don't See
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There are some methods you can use to add content to your website that only bots will see. For example, you can use the same color for text and backgrounds, which makes it difficult for the human eye to detect. You can also use tiny fonts or set elements with CSS so that they appear hidden. However, Yahoo's bots will still see this text and can index it as content on your website. This method is one that some people use to try to manipulate search engines. For example, some may try to gain traffic for irrelevant keywords by placing keywords on a website that only bots can see.
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