I guess my main questions are why Yahoo is not indexing my pages and whether a sitemap is absolutely essential for even a small site. My site is less than 20 pages, and the navigation is very simple. It has been up for many months now, but Yahoo has only indexed 2 pages. Any guesses why? And would submitting a sitemap solve the problem?
I’m more or less a noob at all of this, and so the fact that my pages are not indexed has me concerned that I have botched the url structure of the site or something.
The site is Health Through Prayer – A Modern Approach to Christian Health
I’m not so much worried about getting traffic from Yahoo, but I’ve been worried that the lack of indexing there might mean something about my site is broken or sub-optimal (such as my url structure, or something).
The only reason I started playing with Yahoo’s site explorer at all was because folks have referred to that as a better way than Google webmaster tools to see your backlinks. Backlinks that I know exist never seem to show up on Google, so I did some searching and consensus seems to be that Google webmaster tools, while very valuable, is not great at listing backlinks. Some suggested Yahoo site explorer is much better at this function. But over at Yahoo, I can’t even seem to get my pages indexed, let alone look at a better list of my backlinks.
Perhaps a better question for me to ask is whether anyone can suggest a great (and preferably free!) tool for seeing the links back your site.
Although, to be honest, worrying too much about what Yahoo is doing might be a waste of time. My site typically ranks at least as well in Yahoo as it does in Google, but Google sends me about 50 times the volume of traffic. So unless you’re targeting a demographic that is more likely to use Yahoo, you might find that putting any great amount of time into it is time that you could have better spent improving your content, code or link profile elsewhere.