Yahoo! provides websites for people that wish to sell goods online, known as Yahoo! Stores. This templated website allows for the use of a unique website address to serve as the home page, but requires any product and sales pages to be hosted on the Yahoo! subdomain stores.yahoo.net. This can pose a legitimate problem if you are trying to rank in search engines for a popular product that your are selling on the website. Can search engine optimization do the trick?
A recent thread at Search Engine Watch Forums discusses this topic, when a member asks if he is “facing any problems when trying to optimize a Yahoo! Stores website. Marcia, a senior and much respected Moderator offers that although she has not had personal experience optimizing such site,
I do know that there have been issues in the past because of links in from Yahoo shopping. You might want to check out Yahoo's technical documentation for their stores, and in particular check into usage of relative and absolute linking in the navigation.
Another member adds that
The (Yahoo! Store) site was extremely difficult to optimize for natural SERPs because it was built in Yahoo's internal template system, which is great for a novice with very little HTML knowledge, but frustrating for somebody with experienceAnd the latest suggestions starts off with
If you want to preserve the simplicity of the web-based editing, you can learn a bit of RTML to get Y! Stores to output some pretty well optimized pages.
Have you had experience optimizing a Yahoo! Store? Worked with other templated ecommerce platforms successfully? Share your thoughts at Search Engine Watch Forums.
