Meta descriptions and Yahoo!

How important are they for Yahoo indexing?

[Frequent]

I was recently approached about doing some SEO work on a site that was doing great in Google, OK in MSN and was index only in Yahoo!

This is a quality site, updated daily, good sites linking in, etc.

The only thing I can see that may be the culprit is a complete lack of meta keywords and meta description through-out the site. I've no idea how anyone could have justified designing their site without including this info unless they were planning to sell them SEO services at a later time.

Can the total lack of this "standard" meta info cause Yahoo! to not index the site?

What I can say I know after digging through this site:

1) Google doesn't give a rip about meta data.
2) MSN cares but not much.

Freq---

[LifeinAsia]

What I can say I know after digging through this site:
1) Google doesn't give a rip about meta data.

I've heard the same thing many times from many different sources. Yet I also see many pages with high rankings, yet nothing on the page (except strong keywords in the META tags) that should give it good ranking- almost no text and barely a mention of a keyword.

We've been able to bump up positioning of several pages by only tweaking META tags- nothing else was done to the page. Sure, it could be coincidence, but why take the chance? Spend some time on your META tags.

[Frequent]

I agree that META tags are necessary, if not the be-all-end-all.

My primary question is whether or not the TOTAL LACK of META keywords and Meta description could stop slurp in it's tracks and cause it to ignore the rest of the pages on a site.

The site in question is 100% white hat and always has been. It is actually the site of a city owned municipal utilities provider. Yahoo just won't touch the site for some reason and I need to figure out why.

Freq---

[SincerelySandy]

I'm sure yahoo bans sites for all sorts of reasons, but in my experience, it has always been linking patterns that have been the culprit for poorly performing or banned sites in yahoo. It is not always a "cross linking" or "reciprical link" pattern that triggers filters or a ban either. Sometimes it just seems like yahoo didn't like a site I linked to. Matbe one of the sites your project site is linking to is banned in yahoo? If your project site does not have to many outgoing links, I would check all of them to make sure none of the sites you are linking to are banned, starting with the homepage if it has any outgoing links.

Very best of luck figuring it out. I'd be interested in hearing the results.

[jd01]

My primary question is whether or not the TOTAL LACK of META keywords and Meta description could stop slurp in it's tracks and cause it to ignore the rest of the pages on a site.

NO. I have over 15K pages that say NO, lack of tags will not stop Slurp from crawling a site --- or stop Y! from ranking those pages well.

Justin

[Frequent]

Thanks jd01,

I guess I need to look elsewhere.

Is slurp by any chance very sensitive to session IDs? The site does set a session ID using the url at the first pageview.

Freq---

[jd01]

Is slurp by any chance very sensitive to session IDs?

That would be where I would start --- not only for Y!, but for all SEs. *Nothing* good can come from having session IDs indexed in search engines, but they can stop SEs from crawling your site, duplicate your content, and generally, uh, mess(?) up a site and it's rankings.

I would also take a good look at where your links go, and 'nofollow' (or remove) anything at all questionable.

Justin

[Frequent]

Neither Google nor MSN are indexing the session IDs that I can see so I assumed that they were properly "masked" (for lack of a better term) and shouldn't be causing a problem. I'll have to check serverside and see how things are set up.

Freq---