Lackluster SEO via blogging with Yahoo Stores

If the marketing plan of your Yahoo Store involves link building, you need to read this. Yahoo allows storefront managers to install Moveable Type or Wordpress on their Yahoo Merchant account with just a few clicks. This is a step in the right direction. But it falls short of the delivering the intended benefit for users of their Store Manager.

After all, what is the intended benefit of a corporate blog? Naturally, it’s organic search engine traffic …which is derived from a high page rank …which is produced with inbound links from other relevant sites.

That’s all well and good. But as of today, your Yahoo blog must be installed on a separate subdomain from your store. In my case, I’m forced to address it in the domain SITE.sunfitters.com rather than a subdirectory of WWW.sunfitters.com. Why is ths bad? Well because when determining page rank, search engines count different subdomains as different sites.

As I write relevant content on the Yahoo Blog, it will help the page relevance of SITE.* — but will only indirectly affect page rank in the store. After attending a local user group in Boston of SEO’s who use corporate blogging, the consensus was that the URL scheme for corporate blogs makes a big difference in SEO results.

Ideally, the blog should be in a subdirectory of the site whose keywords you wish to optimize. In my case, I want it in www.Sunfitters.com/blog — but Yahoo won’t allow it if I use their Store Manager. A response from Yahoo! Support reported this:

“Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Store Support. I understand that you would like to change the Blog URL from ’site.sunfitters.com/blog/’ to ‘www.sunfitters.com/blog/’. We are sorry, Bill. Since the Domain Traffic for your Store is directed to your Store pages, the Blog URL will only be available through the ’site.sunfitters.com/blog/’ link. We do not currently have an estimated time for if or when this feature or any other features may be released. Regards, Yahoo! Customer Care”

So if Yahoo merchants want to develop relevant content that lifts search engine rankings of their store, then Yahoo’s social networking tools need some work. In the meantime, I guess we’ll rely on landing pages and link building techniques focused exclusively on merchandising product — which in my opinion, isn’t ideal content for link baiting.

One can only hope they fix this soon.