How to get a foreign site listed in Yahoo?

Search engine listing

[novice visitor]

Hi everyone,
I am trying to maintain a new web site for our company. Since we are based in Taiwan, our home page is in traditional Chinese (UTF-8 coding), and then lead to user to either tradtional Chinese (Big5 coding) or English version (Iso-8859-1) of main content. We are successful in getting our web site listed in Google, MSN and Taiwan's Yahoo. However, we are not as successful in getting our English version of web site listed in US Yahoo. We have tried for months to get links to our web site related to our industry with a few success. However, at this moment the site is still not listed at all. Is it because we are a foreign domain URL? What else should I do other than paying recurring US$300 to Yahoo directory?

Any helps is appreciated.

[edited by: engine at 2:40 pm (utc) on July 18, 2005]

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld novice_visitor!

There is a lot of helpful information on this page
[webmasterworld.com...]

I would reccomend that you gain more links. There are alot of helpful suggestion ins the link development forum [webmasterworld.com...] Good luck :)

[novice visitor]

Hi Goodroi,
Thank you. I will invest more time getting more links. Since I am quite new to maintaining a site, I have learned a lot just by reading articles post in this site. It just that being a new web site at foreign country with limited budget is difficult to get recipical links. I am just wondering if US Yahoo has preference for domestic URL over foreign URL. In addition, are you penalize for submitting subdirectory of a web site (i.e. #*$!/eng/)? This is due to the fact our root directory index page is in Big5 character set, and I believe most US user don't have tradtional Chinese language pack installed.

[goodroi]

Most US users can not handle chinese characters. If you want to rank in a country specific search, the ideal situation would be to have the site on the country's TLD, have it hosted in that country and have the content in the correct language.

You may think about launching a seperate sites for the US market and the Chinese market. Some problems of this would be the potential for duplicate content and heavy interlinking.

[novice visitor]

Create a new site with correct language, host, domain is out of reach as of this moment. Curiously, when I search our URL in US Yahoo, one of our Taiwanese link providers showed up. Their domain and character set is the same as ours. The Chinese words showed up as well. Since they are in the site promotion/ advertising business, the site has higher PR and more back links, and maybe that is the reason it showed up. Unfortunately, other US domain directories that contains our site link didn't showed up in the search. I guess I just have to wait patiently and trying to get more links. Thanks for your advice.