Hey! Chilling at Starbucks in Cordova, TN, on the road and decided to drop a quick post about a cool, free thing you can do in about 10 minutes that will help your SEO efforts by consolidating your link popularity for your Yahoo Store.
BACKGROUND: (skip down to ACTION STEPS if you don't care about the "why" part).
One of the things that drives me insane about Yahoo! Stores is the "multiple URLS pointing to the same content" problem. I cover this in somewhere in my Yahoo Store DUMMIES book.
Honestly, I can't ever remember what page something is on, or even what chapter, so I use the AMAZON "Search Inside This Book" feature all the time. LINK: 301's
To be fair, Yahoo did a great job with the 301 redirect of all the Yahoo URLS, (see Yahoo Store Domain Redirect Setting in Paul Boisvert's incredibly helpful help files)...
<rob's rant>
Even if you use this cool 301 redirect for your store URLS, there are still multiple URLS pointing to the same content and I bitch about this all the time: YAHOO NEEDS TO FIX THIS IF Y!SB EVER WANTS PROFESSIONAL SEOs TO NOT THINK OF YAHOO! STORES AS A SECOND RATE STORE DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM.
</rob's rant>
The worst example of this multiple URL problem (and there are others) is the Yahoo Store issue with WWW / NON-WWW URLs. ACK!
DUPLICATE CONTENT PROBLEM -- For example, links to WWW URLS like http://www.quiltblockparty.com/ and links to NON-WWW URLS, like http://quiltblockparty.com, lead spiders to the same content on your store under two different URLs. The same content gets indexed two different ways and it looks like you have the same content in two separate places, which is the definition of duplicate content.
SPLIT LINK POPULARITY PROBLEM -- Even worse, your link popularity gets split up between the NON-WWW and the WWW so your site looks like two 4-foot midgets to Google instead of one huge Shaq-sized Web site.
Enter Google Webmaster Tools (formerly Google SiteMaps)!
Back in June, Google and Yahoo! partnered to make Yahoo! Stores compatible with Google Sitemaps . <<< this link is to a good blog post about SITEMAPS by my Y!buddy, Duncan Shen...
ACTION STEPS:
Turn on SiteMaps in your Yahoo! Store Manager. Log into your STORE MANAGER and click on the SEARCH ENGINES link in the lower left corner and scroll down.
Set up a Google Account (use your Gmail or Adwords login) and register your domain with Google Sitemaps.
HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART: Set the Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools to the WWW version of your site (if that's where all your content is).
According to Google's Matt Cutts and Vanessa from the
Webmaster Tools team, Google will only show your URLs with the WWW and
all of your link popularity will consolidate to the WWW version of your
store, no matter who links to what version.
VERY COOL! And now it's time for another Iced Mocha.
Happy Labor Day! Don't forget the sunblock! -- Rob
