Optimizing for Yahoo!, MSN, and Other Engines with Meta Tags

Unlike Google's emphasis on inbound links, most search engines rely on internal consistency among site content and keywords to produce search engine results. Yahoo!, an early Internet pioneer, started in 1994 as a directory of the Web, rather than as a searchable index. A hierarchical directory is organized by fixed subject area, like the Yellow Pages or books on library shelves, rather than arranged on‐the‐fly by relevance in response to a search request.

Using human editors to review and assign sites to categories, Yahoo! quickly became one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. Over the next ten years, Yahoo's paid program for directory inclusion began to fall out of favor, and it acquired its own search engine technology. (See Chapter 11 for more information on the paid directory.)