Yahoo has a different set of metrics and priorities when calculating your rank on the SERPs. Most of the times, they are similar to Google’s metrics like the number of incoming links, title page content etc. For obvious reasons, duplicate content has been a bottle neck both for Google and Yahoo (others as well). And both the search engines are in the process of rolling out new tools everyday to beat the phenomenon of content duplication.

Yahoo is the one who has come up with a brand new tool today - Dynamic URL rewriting. According to Yahoo!,

The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

And the benefits of this feature as explained by Yahoo!

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

I’m an admirer of Yahoo! for it’s fresh and innovative approaches to improve their tools. This one sure looks promising. Get the full story on the Yahoo search blog.

Google isn’t the only search engine online - remember?
Yahoo is somehow neglected while optimising the blog/site by majority of webmasters. Google seems to be the favourite of many, for searching as well as optimising their sites.The reason - the major part of online traffic goes through Google and Yahoo shares only 1/4th of it.

Does that mean that Yahoo be neglected? Not at all. infact Yahoo! can bring you as many visitors as Google, provided you have a strong presence in their index.

Now, how do you make it to Yahoo’s index? 3 ways.

- Get someone to link to you.
- Write comments on other blogs and point the link to your blog.
- Submit a sitemap to Yahoo!

I don’t think further explanation is required for steps 1 and 2. But how do you submit a sitemap to Yahoo?
Hope you are aware that, Google accepts the standard xml format sitemap while Yahoo accepts the text format sitemap. This site offers you a free sitemap in all the four formats. XML,TXT,HTML and ROR.

Now, with the recent collaboration of all the major search engines(Google,Yahoo and MSN) you don’t have to worry about the various formats.All you need is one single sitemap file - in XML format.

How to submit to Yahoo?
- Create a robots.txt file if you don’t have one in the root directory.(See more info here)
- In the robots file, add this line..

Sitemap: your complete url here

Now, this is a universal sitemap recognition standard as agreed by Google,Yahoo and MSN. The respective crawlers will find out the sitemap from this line, where ever it is placed in the robots.txt file.