A New Found Respect For Yahoo!

As I explained in my first post, I am a Google fan boy. But really I've only seen it from a user's point of view. If there's one thing I've learned in the five days as the webmaster of this site it's that making websites discoverable by search engine's web crawlers is a pain in the butt. There's the META tags, and the site-maps, and the registering of the accounts on the major search players. It can be one of the most frustrating parts of building a website.

Each of the three major search providers (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) offer a webmaster toolkit to help webmasters get their site shown higher up when a user searches for certain key words. After fiddling with each of the sites, submitting site-maps, adding html meta tags to verify the accounts, etc. and trying to get everything the way I wanted, I realized Yahoo was absolutely incredible with their webmaster support. Their setup process is quick and painless. All I had to do was verify my ownership, upload my site map and boom within an hour I was on top of a Yahoo! search for "FaradTech" and "Farad Tech". Now, I may have just gotten lucky and that was just when the crawler was heading to my site, but hey, I was still impressed.

Google's setup wasn't quite as easy. There were a few more clicks involved and some debugging I had to do. Once I finally got everything in order it took a day or two of pleading, begging and crying to even get Google to show my site even in a search for my domain. But alas, when it finally happened and I saw my website on the top of that search list, there was all but tears of joy streaming from my face.

That brings me to Bing. I don't really have much to say other than that its still not seeing my site 5 days later. Their tools, while they may seem useful at first, really don't offer enough feedback to troubleshoot any problems that may have come about or even why the wannabe search engine's crawler hasn't even touched my site....IN 5 DAYS!!!! I guess that's why Microsoft has resorted to monkey labor to get their search algorithm better.

All in all in this section of the search wars I give Yahoo! two thumbs up for their web master support, Google one thumb up and Bing a wrinkled certificate for participating.