The Yahoo SLURP Crawler - Getting SLURP to Come Over

Share |

After having said all this about Yahoo SLURP, there is now the little issue of getting your site crawled by this particular search engine spider. There are some ways to go about this task, and here we begin to see the inklings of what would be the order of the day in a search engine market dominated by Yahoo! (who seems to be very, very concerned about its bottom line).

Linking

The first strategy is good old linking; just get a link on a site on which Yahoo! regularly crawls, and voila. You have SLURP knocking on your door. This can be done by corresponding with a site which ranks well on Yahoo, or by submitting your web site to directories which SLURP regularly crawls (you can find these by searching for “directories” on Yahoo). If SLURP deep crawls (crawls lots of pages instead of just one or two) your site regularly, you have a high chance of getting a good ranking on the key word or topic for which you have optimized your site.

Yahoo Companion Toolbar

This is supposed to trigger the SLURP robot to crawl your site. And it also enables searchers to search within your site, offering value for your audience and attracting Yahoo SLURP as well.

Sitematch

This is done by paying Yahoo's fees and submitting your site. This guarantees you will be added to the index (at a price) but is no guarantee of your website's ranking in the SERPs.

This is a scary service, and some reviewers speculate that it is a foretaste of what site owners would face in a market dominated by Yahoo. It is carried over from Overture (which Yahoo purchased) and involves an annual fee for submitted pages. The URLs are submitted into Yahoo’s index and are then crawled by SLURP every 48 hours.

However, apart from the one off fee, there is a cost per click fee charged for each lead driven to your site (so you better have deep pockets)

Apart from SLURP visiting every two days, you also get listed on searches done on about.com, Excite, Overture and other Yahoo partners. However there is no guarantee of a high ranking, and frankly I do not like this method (because I absolutely love free stuff).

There is a way to submit  your site for free,  however Yahoo does not guarantee that websites submitted through such means will ever be crawled by SLURP.

By now you should know enough about SLURP to spot it, track it, attract it, and prevent it from crawling specific pages of your site.