12/30/04 Yahoo! comments on page size and code validation

Jim Mayers of Yahoo! made some very enlightening comments about Yahoo's lack of interest in things like page size and code validation that definitely deserved some follow-up.

Chicago SEO Conference

 In the meantime, to again whet your appetites, I'll briefly report on the presentation and announcement by Jon Glick, from Yahoo. After a rather tumultuous beginning, the new Yahoo search engine is now handling redirects correctly (at least according to Jon). When redirecting Page A to Page B, this is what you should expect to see:

A to B, with a 302 (Moved Temporarily) response code : Page B will be added to the index, but the URL will be listed as A and all link credit will remain with A.

A/ to B/deep, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : In this instance, we're talking about redirecting a home page to a deeper page, as so often seems to happen when a "home page" default ends up being a CGI script in some other folder. Strangely, in my opinion, Yahoo has decided to treat this exactly as they treat a 302. The home page URL will be listed in the SERPs, but the deeper linked page's content will be indexed.

A to B, with a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code : Page A will be dropped entirely from the index, and page B will be added in its place. All links and anchor text attributed to page A will be credited to page B.

A meta-refresh, coded directly in the page, can now take the place of a server-side redirect. Considering how badly meta-refreshes have been abused by spammer in the past, this is surprising news. But it's also good news, especially for the many webmasters who don't have access to server level redirects. A meta-refresh of 1 second or less will be treated as a 301, while anything longer than 1 second will be considered a 302.

Chicago SEO conference – Jim World Gazette

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