Dynamic page rewrites not showing up in Yahoo

[jshites]

Hello all,

We have a five year old directory site. Over a year ago, we had all our dynamic PHP pages rewritten to show something like = www.url.com/category/xxx instead of www.url.com/category/xxx?PHPSESSID=3456abc567

After patiently waiting, we noticed that Google started indexing the newly rewritten pages/extensions properly. However, Yahoo hasn't? It has been about a year and a half?

Any suggestions on why Google has picked up on the rewrites and Yahoo hasn't?

I was also wandering why all our pages that come up in Yahoo's SERPs, show our url's w/ out the www. infront? Duplicate content penalty? How to fix the situation?

Any input would be very helpful.

Thanks,

[sufyaaan]

When you implemented mod_rewrite on your server, did you do 301s on your old URLs to the new ones? It's important. Google is known to be smart enough to catch up on the rewritten URLs quickly as compared to Yahoo and MSN. The other SEs take relatively longer time to fix the problem. Your best bet would be to put 301 redirects to the new URLs.

Also, you need to do 301 from non-www to www to be safe from any duplicate content penalties.

[pk_synths]

Your best bet would be to put 301 redirects to the new URLs.

Correcto. Unlike Google, Yahoo actually goes to to URLs in it's index directly so if there is no 301 rewrite and your page still pulls up than it will not remove the URL from the index. Applying the 301 is key to remove old URLs from Yahoo but it still takes a few months even with the redirect.

[gabs]

To help speed things up use a good sitemap that deap links..

Make sure you have a good number of links pointing at the sitemap (I suggest a internal sidewide footer link and a few externals)


Hope that helps..