Yahoo has a tendancy to list index pages of a new site and then take its good ole time coming back to pick up the rest of the pages. There are two ways that I have been experimenting with to get them to pick up my pages faster.

The first way is the have a blog and deep link to the individual pages you want. This could be pretty time consuming if you have tons of pages. I have been linking to my updated tournament site pages from this blog to help Yahoo list my individual pages. So far each time I link to an individual page it is picked up within a day or three. For example the following page is not yet listed in Yahoo.

Rhode Island Soccer Tournaments

So now that I just deep linked to it, it will show up in the next few days based on my past experience.

The next option is to use rss feeds. Blogs and news sites are pretty hot in search engines right now since they like fresh content and most blog software converts the entries to rss feeds which are snapped up quickly. I just converted my tournament entries into a rss feed and added that feed to My Yahoo and My Msn. Any new tournaments I add automatically update my feed and are picked up right away. Saving me from having keep adding new tournaments in my blog manually.

Which option is best? I am not sure of the time frame and which option is better so I am now preforming this test. I have updated a tournament page that currently is not listed in Yahoo. The Minnesota tournament page has been updated and picked up on my rss feed.

Which page will be indexed in Yahoo faster? How long will it take to be picked up? These are questions that I am interested in. I will probably continue to test these theories and see if I can get some consistant data.

Since my site is programmed in PHP I referenced the following information PHP & MySQL : Generating an RSS feed - Presentations & Articles - Bhatt.id.au to program my php/mysql site to build the feeds. It took approximately 5 hours to work it into my programming for two of my sites. If anyone is actually interested in the steps I took to prepare the feed and get it syndicated, drop me a line and I will write an article.