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Yahoo! Launches New Crawler

Posted By Darren Rowse 31st of July 2006 Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments

If you’ve noticed any changes in the traffic coming to your blogs from Yahoo! it could be a result of their New Version of it’s Search Crawler called ‘Slurp’ – (a crawler is the bot that Search Engines send to your site to index it).

Slurp is said to be faster and more efficient and will have to visit your site less and will use less bandwidth when it does.

Have you noticed any changes?

I’m yet to do any detailed analysis but my first impression is that it’s not had much impact upon the amount of traffic Yahoo! has sent to most of my blogs – however for a couple of them I’m getting traffic from Yahoo! for the first time ever (I’ve never had much luck with Yahoo SEO to this point so this is a welcome sign.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Slurp is new? This is a bit of a shock to me, it’s been indexing me for months now. What was the previuos version of Yahoo!’s spider called?

  2. Yeah I had heard of Slurp quite long ago. There is an article about Slurp on Jim Hedger’s blog (news.stepforth.com/) that dates back to Novermber 29th of 2004. And interestingly even Yahoo calls it a new crawler.

  3. I have definitely noticed a significant increase in my Yahoo traffic. I have never been properly indexed in Yahoo – but they to be making up for lost time. However, the increase started early in the month so I am not entirely sure that this is the result of the new slurp or the old one. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence.

  4. That’s pretty weird. I too had Slurp scouring my site at least seven months ago, yet the blog post above is quite clearly on an official Yahoo blog.

    Perhaps it’s just a new version with the same name and somebody at Yahoo got their wires crossed.

  5. Yep, I’ve noticed that I’m getting much more traffic from Yahoo on one of my websites (it’s not a blog).
    I haven’t notice any changes on my blogs. 90% -Google, 5% – Yahoo, 5% – MSN.

  6. I still haven’t notice any changes.

  7. Yes, the “old” crawler was indeed called Slurp. Perhaps they meant to say something like: “This is a new version of Slurp.”

  8. Darren,

    In my experience, Yahoo SEO is all about links and anchor text.

    The more quality links with targeted anchor text you get the better the rankings, this is also something MSN has liked in the past. So if you want to rank in Yahoo for “widgets” for example, use link anchor text like:

    widgets, blue widgets, widget fun, more great widgets etc…

    Just my 2cents

  9. You are spot on about the spelling driving the traffic. Also, misspelled celebrity names- bang on every time!

  10. Michelle says: 08/01/2006 at 1:38 pm

    Maybe that explains the sudden decrease in Yahoo traffic my best-earning site started experiencing about 9 days ago… I’m still watching anxiously, hoping it will recover. *sob*

  11. Yahoo! Engineered a New Spider…

    Yahoo! has launched a new Spider, called Yahoo! Slurp, earlier this week. The new spider will:Crawl fasterMore efficient at visiting websitesReduce bandwidth co……

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