What I Learnt on my Journey Down The Rabbit Hole

byJules73

1.1K followers

6 years ago

So following my revelations in yesterday's post I decided today I would investigate why Yahoo! was "ignoring me". If you missed the post from yesterday you can read it here, it might shed some clarity on the reason for this post ;-)

The first thing I did was check My Sites- Bing WebMaster tools. I am satisfied that my website is verified and is being crawled by the bing bots.

When I tried to check with Yahoo! I discovered as previously suspected that Yahoo! search is powered by Bing. Therefore no Yahoo-specific SEO exists.

But it still doesn't explain why my Bing results do not also show for Yahoo! on Jaaxy?

So, off I went trawling the web to see if I could find a solution.

I happened across a website called Search Engine Genie and within that site found a "Yahoo Rank-Position Checker Tool"

I searched under the Keyword which I had previously ranked as 1st position on page 1 of Bing and I got the following message "not showing in the top 250" The excerpt for this tool reads as follows:

"Yahoo is another good search engine. This tool is used to specifically check the position of your site in Yahoo's search engines. All you have to do is type in your URL and this tool will check your site's position in Yahoo's first 1000 results. If your URL is present within these results, it will output the position it occupies"

But on reflection I'm not 100% how old this site is and therefore how relevant any tracking would be if the links are out-of-date. The mystery continued...

I was determined to get to the bottom of my question. "Why was my published article not showing as ranked on Yahoo! when it was ranked on Bing? "

For those of you out there who are more experienced and knowledgeable in this department you likely may already have the answer...or indeed a quicker way to find the answer, but that which is oft the case when I am learning anything new, if I can find the longer way around a solution seems to be the norm and where I end up!

Then I had a light bulb moment and thought of good old "You've gone incognito"

I opened up a new incognito window on Yahoo! searched under the keyword and lo and behold my published article is showing in number 1 position on the 1st page of Yahoo!

Mission Accomplished - Yahoo!

I also checked my September article that was ranked on Bing in 5th position on page 1 on Jaaxy on Yahoo! the very same article shows on page 3 in 3rd position?!? The plot thickens...

I've no idea how to explain this one, nor given the time already spent have I the inclination to investigate further...other pressing matters at hand!

Which leads me to what I had discovered down the rabbit hole when I had checked Bing WebMaster tools earlier today.

I had decided to run an SEO Analyzer to discover which areas of my site might need work to comply with SEO best practices.

The results of this led me to educate myself on the importance of <H1> tags courtesy of Neil Patel

Neil says "the H1 is an HTML tag that indicates a heading on a website" .

H1s have always been a major ranking factor.

"H1s aren’t a big secret. The fact is, just about anyone who knows anything about SEO or HTML is using them.

80% of the first-page search results in Google use an h1. But, most people are using them incorrectly!"

Upon Neil's advice I downloaded an application named Screaming Frog (not an affiliate link) which basically is a SEO spider and this applications trawls your website. One of the things you can check is to see if all your published articles have H1s attached in place and a lot more besides.

The results for me gave great indicators on duplicates I had unknowingly got and a great many insights on other relevant areas of my site that need attention.

Not for everyone I know but I attached a link above to the application if you are interested/curious.

I eventually emerged from the rabbit hole a little wiser and hungry!

Good evening WA friends ~ Jules