Part of: Tenured Evergreen SEO
Published:
Published:
by Wayne Smith
Yahoo started as a curated directory of websites, where a team of editors manually reviewed and organized sites into categories. Yahoo allowed websites to be listed in their search engine for free. They would create a title and description for your site.
Later on, Yahoo introduced a paid service that could speed up the process of getting your site listed. In contrast, Google today has rules that prohibit paid links. Their rules are outlined in their terms of service.
Yahoo pioneered innovations
Innovations to search by Yahoo include having a data center where the data is on a keyword-by-keyword basis; And, is spread across systems. In short, this innovation allows search engines to scale ... invented out of necessity it is a general requirement for all internet search engines.
Infrastructure
Why do many in the SEO field not consider the limitations of Infrastructure when discussing SEO theories? Some speculate that AI will replace search as if it has the ability to look at the content of the entire internet in real-time.
Yahoo's infrastructure was based on 16 and 32-bit technology: Using servers with as much computing power as a smartphone to scale the index must be based on presorted keywords. Yahoo did release the specs of their systems.
Infoseek would instead of having the data presorted alphabetically sort the indexes based on the number of links a website/page had pointing towards it. Hotbot/Inktomi would presort the index based on relevancy algorithms such as keyword density; Where on the page the keyword was used; And, what tag (headlines, et al) the keyword was found inside of.
A search for "Denmark, Newspapers," would pull the data from the websites listed in Denmark and the websites listed in the Newspaper index and then combine the two -- combining two data sets would be a simple operation; Algorithms that can combine data sets can be found on GitHub.
Algorithm Efficiency
The difference between innovation and obvious is a spectrum; Solutions seem obvious to the person who arrived at a solution.
Sorting through a long list with a modern computer takes microseconds but with slower computer systems ...
Distributing the work across systems
Having an index file for each keyword results in only needing to retrieve information from small files. It also allows different systems to do the work ... in short, distribute the work.
While obvious to most, we still don't have an off-the-shelf open-source distributed database system today. It was a custom build, and Yahoo should get credit.
All modern Internet search engines are based on distributed databases. Another obvious to some
Another obvious efficiency step is you can stop querying the data when you have enough information to provide the answer.
The natural order of the data, regardless of whether it is alphabetical or PageRank, determines if a site will show up in search.
Data Architecture and SEO
When a page is optimized for only one of a two-word search query and doesn't appear high enough in the natural order of the index. Using the obvious info structure, it will not show up for a search with both words --The search stopped before finding the unoptimized word.
Yahoo's natural order was alphabetical and did not create this situation. Although it exists in other search engines, (intentionally).
Search Engine Optimization
SEO was trying to get keywords people would search for into the page title, description and keyword tags.
Title, Description Meta data
The title must accurately describe what the page is about; Each page must have a unique title; The keyword should appear in the title; The title and description will affect click-through rates ... indicate in the title and description what is different about your page from all the other pages.
Imagine the CEO's expression
When the technician who reviews the data log informs the CEO that people are searching for domain names imagine the CEO's expression.
Really? Can you make the domain name a keyword?
Sure boss no problem.
Exact Keyword Match Domains
Today, people still directly enter the site name into the search query form instead of using the address bar, and they do it with intent. They expect the search engine to give them the site in the results. It is an evergreen SEO factor.
For a curated directory there is no need to qualify the exact match domain.
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