It appears that webmasters are beginning to simply write off Yahoo. Recently Yahoo started to scan websites and display the results within the search results:

Yahoo has labeled this “searchscan” and this with the over active crawl of Yahoo’s slerp is beginning to annoy webmasters around the world. On a thread in webmasterworld there are discussions about slowing down Yahoo Slerp and banning it all together.

Personally from an SEO standpoint, I am torn, traffic is traffic and even if Yahoo only gives you 10% of your traffic that is still good quality free traffic. Now the “gray hat” seo part of me, says block Yahoo Slerp, but not because of it’s over active crawl or because of its new site scan, but block it to stop your competitors from seeing what you’re doing with your link campaigns. Most software tools and competitors use Yahoo to check websites back link profiles. Your back links let your competitors have a clear picture as to what links you have, what links may be new and what links may be paid. Blocking Yahoo will eliminate the competition from seeing what links you have and what links may be new.

If you want to block Yahoo Slerp here is where you can do it.

If your heavy into link building in a highly competitive market, blocking Yahoo may be the answer to staying ahead of your competition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Yahoo has its own webmaster tools, they call it site explorer. In theory it is to be similar to Google’s webmaster tools, although it is a half hearted attempt and really does not offer you much insight into your websites stats within Yahoo.

Yahoo site explorer does offer the opportunity to submit a sitemap to Yahoo, and to review what and how many pages from your site are actually indexed (within the Yahoo search results). It will also display your external and internal links, and this is one spot where Yahoo really shines. Yahoo displays all of your back links (links from external sites). Unlike (Google “traditionally’ only shows a certain percentage of your back links), your Yahoo back links can also be exported to excel so you can thumb through them and sort them efficiently. Lastly Yahoo does provide you the opportunity to remove pages or entire websites from its index which can be handy if Slurp (Yahoo’s search engine spiders name) indexes pages that you did not want indexed.

Yahoo has a signifgant amount of work to do to gets its version of webmaster tools up to snuff: offer the basic search results for your site and web site ranking would be the bare minimum.