The Blog of Adam Patten

Today I noticed a nice feature of having a URL structure for your site based on the date (adampatten.com/2007/06/08/). When I’m looking for something on a particular site I typically use Google’s site search, its usually better than most built in searches and it I don’t have to hunt around on the site for the search form. Well today I wanted to find something on Matt Mullenweg’s site, but he has been blogging for so long that it returned lots of results and I wanted results from recent posts so I just narrowed my search using his URL structure. So not only does the URL date structure allow users to instantly know when the post was made by the URL, go directly to an archive for the day, month, or year based on the URL, it also allows users easy ways to search your site using external search engines. Too bad I lacked this knowledge when I created the URL structure for this site. But I went ahead and corrected this mistake and updated the URL structure for this site. Since there aren’t any inbound links and virtual no PR I’m not really worried about the SEO/usability issues. So learn from my mistake and use those dates in your URL structure.

Popularity: 93% [?]

I’m really curious as to how Yahoo! decides when to include a website in their search results. I have had this website up and running since early February and submitted it 3 times (about a month apart) to be included in Yahoo!’s search results, yet until this week I have been omitted from Yahoo!’s results. Granted there isn’t much content on this site and I don’t post very often, but I don’t understand why Yahoo! decided to shun my site. Google had me listed within the first week and MSN had me up within a reasonable amount of time. I can only guess the referring links from Joey and Jon (looks like Jon removed the link, but Google Analytics tells me there was one at one point) are what made Yahoo! finally deem me worthy to grace their results. Seems to me that if a site owner submits their site and there is a decent amount unique content there they shouldn’t need to have referring links to be listed. If I had any readers on this blog, this is the point where I would pose them with the question “Any ideas on why Yahoo! takes so long to include a site in it’s listings?” So let those comments roll in!

Popularity: 73% [?]