How to Submit Your Blogger Blog to Yahoo

One of the most important as well as efficient ways to attract traffic to your site is to make sure that your Blogger blog is properly indexed by the major search engines. These, of course, include Yahoo. If you are interested in increasing your chances of having your site quickly and properly indexed by the Yahoo search engine it pays to submit your site and your feed. In this post I´ll take you through the process of signing up with Yahoo, authenticating your site and adding your site feed to Yahoo Site Explorer.

Yahoo is notorious for being slow at indexing and will not necessarily include all crawled pages in its search results. For guaranteed inclusion you can opt for a paid service ($ 299) but if you follow the steps below you stand a fair chance of having your Blogger blog properly indexed relatively quickly and without any cost.

How to Submit Your Blogger Blog to Yahoo

1. Sign up for a free Yahoo Account if you don't already have one.

2. Sign in to Yahoo Site Explorer where you will be taken to the My Sites page.

3. Submit your Blogger blog by entering the URL of your blog and then clicking on the Add My Site button.

4. You will now see the address of your blog included in the site list. The 3 columns to the right contain information about feeds, actions, and status. You will notice that the status of your site will be set to new (represented by a more or less yellow circle). Now click on the link to your site or on the Explore button.

5. You will be taken to the results page and should get a message like the one pictured below.

6. From the menu on the left click on Authentication. (If you clicked the Explore button in Step 4 you need to go back to the previous page and click on the link to your site now.)

7. You will be presented with 2 authentication options. Choose Add a META Tag from the dropdown menu, then copy the code provided using Ctrl + C.

8. Login to your Blogger blog in a new window or tab. Keep the window of the Yahoo Site Explorer open as you will be returning.

9. Navigate to Layout --> Edit HTML in your Blogger blog.

10. Upon arriving at the Template page it is a good idea to make a backup of your blog's template as a precautionary measure. Download it your computer by clicking on the Download Full Template link. Remember, if you inadvertently overwrite a line code you may not be able to restore your template so it is worth taking an extra few moments to create a backup.

11. Once you have backed up the template of your blog locate the Head tag: <head>. It should be only a few lines of code down from the top. Now insert the copied code from Yahoo in the position suggested as shown in the picture below using the Ctrl + V command.

12. After pasting the code into the template there is one more thing to be done. You will need to add a trailing slash at the end of the new line of code to avoid getting a parse error. Once you have added the trailing slash and are certain you have placed the code in the correct position go ahead and click on the Save Template button.

13. Return to Yahoo Site Explorer, click on the “Ready to Authenticate” button. Now follow the My Sites link. You will see that the status of your site has been verified and is represented by a green checkmark.

14. Click again on your blog´s link. Then select Feeds from the menu on the left. You will be taken to the feeds page where you can go ahead and add a feed for your blog by entering the URL of the feed. The extension of the feed is either atom.xml or rss.xml. Notice in the example below I have set an extra parameter to handle redirection of the feed by services such as Feedburner: atom.xml?redirect=false or rss.xml?redirect=false

15. Once the feed has been accepted it will take around 24 hours before it is active. After this time, and provided there are no errors, Yahoo Site Explorer displays “processed” followed by a green tick (just as in step 13).

You have now done everything that is needed to have your Blogger blog crawled and indexed by Yahoo. Check back periodically to see if Yahoo has indexed your pages. This process will take some time so do not expect overnight results. However, once Yahoo recognises your feed, your pages will be regularly crawled and any updates in content indexed. The process of adding a feed and verifying your site will have gone a long way towards ensuring your site is included in Yahoo search engine results.

Good luck!