Yahoo has a different set of metrics and priorities when calculating your rank on the SERPs. Most of the times, they are similar to Google’s metrics like the number of incoming links, title page content etc. For obvious reasons, duplicate content has been a bottle neck both for Google and Yahoo (others as well). And both the search engines are in the process of rolling out new tools everyday to beat the phenomenon of content duplication.

Yahoo is the one who has come up with a brand new tool today – Dynamic URL rewriting. According to Yahoo!,

The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

And the benefits of this feature as explained by Yahoo!

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

I’m an admirer of Yahoo! for it’s fresh and innovative approaches to improve their tools. This one sure looks promising. Get the full story on the Yahoo search blog.