Yahoo! has quietly released an update to its URL submission form that allows you to specify the location of a text file with a list of your site URLs for it to crawl. Sound familiar? It seems to be Yahoo’s answer to Google Sitemaps.

Of course, Yahoo! offers no guarantee that your URLs will be crawled, but if your site is full of dynamic URLs or any URLs that are otherwise hard for the engine to find on its own, this may be a way to make sure Yahoo! is aware of them and increase your chances of having those pages added to its index. All without paying, as is the case with Yahoo’s Search Submit Product.

It is also worth noting that the format for the new Yahoo! file and Google’s Sitemap files are different. So you won’t be able to use the same file for both. I’ll begin testing this functionality with a couple of my clients and post here with any feedback and/or results.

I think it’s interesting that Google appears to be testing a paid inclusion product as well… The world of SEO just keeps getting more interesting (and difficult to mange).


Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO