Update: 7/28/2012: The link to submit your RSS feeds to Yahoo in the U.S. appears to have been disabled and is now nothing more than a distant memory. Although as of this update, the UK submission page for submitting your RSS feeds to Yahoo is still available.
I was looking through my website logs over at HostGator and feeling great about the visitors that have been trickling into the website. Everyone out there who has launched a website and put in an honest effort to grow traffic knows what I’m talking about. There’s something very satisfying in seeing people find your site. It was only a couple months ago that I was hoping to get an Alexa rank just to have one, and now I’m on the verge on breaking the one million mark. It might seem silly to be proud about a rank of one million using an imperfect measuring tool, but it still makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something.
I noticed in my website visitor logs that I was being visited rather heavily by the GoogleBot, but the Yahoo Web Crawler was nowhere to be found. I checked to see if the site even existed in the Yahoo search engine and I found three links. I figured it couldn’t hurt to manually add it to Yahoo since I have never done it before. I always figured Google and Yahoo just magically found my sites. I always saw the GoogleBot make its way into my logs, so I just assumed Yahoo was no different.
After adding my website, I added my feeds to Yahoo (formerly at publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php) as well. This way my site posts can be found in the Yahoo feeds database by others. It will also keep Yahoo aware of my site so it hopefully gets indexed regularly. These are a couple of simple steps I took today, but I think they’re definitely important ones. If your site isn’t being found by Yahoo, you’re site is missing out on gobs of traffic possibilities.