Yahoo’s search engine spider is capturing the full text of web pages, up to a 500,000 characters limit. The new Yahoo search also supports many file types, including HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents.

What does this mean to you and your web site?

Yahoo is a very big player in the search engine market. Its new search technology will power nearly half of all searches conducted within the United States.

That means that your web site should have good rankings in Yahoo if you don’t want to lose customers.

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Most webmasters face this problem sooner or later. The rankings of your website on Google have dropped and you don’t know why this happened.

There are many reasons about rankings on Google can drop:

Reason 1: Your server rejects Google’s spider

Have you installed a new robots.txt file lately? Does your robots.txt file allow Google to index your website? Have you changed your htaccess file? Have you recently installed a spam bot blocker?

Are you 100% sure that the spam bot blocker lets Google through to your website? Google uses different IP addresses for its different spiders and some spam blockers might accidentally block one of the spiders. This might also look like cloaking to Google.

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The New York Times has published an article about Amit Singhal which is in charge of Google’s ranking algorithm.Some interesting facts about Google’s ranking algorithm was revealed in this interview.

Google knows its algorithm is not perfect

“[...] Any of Google’s 10,000 employees can use its ‘Buganizer’ system to report a search problem, 100 times a day they do this.”

“a balancing act was involved in tweaking and quality control . ‘You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively,” [...] ‘You can’t only launch things that are 100 percent positive.’”

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