inurl: vs. site: and supplemental results

What is the difference between a search of inurl:URL and site:URL

For my own site, there is a vast difference between the two. I get 20,000 results for the site: search and only 1 for the inurl: search. Sure enough, I get almost no referals from Yahoo! My referrals from Google are more than 100 times those of Yahoo's, so most of my pages appear hidden to most Yahoo searchers.

Interestingly, though, if I pick a search phrase like "this is a madeup phrase", it won't find my page but will find many others. However, if I narrow the search even further to exclude others such as with "this is a madeup phrase and it only appears on my site", Yahoo will find my page and no others. Therefore, it appears that my pages are listed in some kind of supplemental index.

What's this all about?

are you doing both searches on yahoo, or is one of the two on google?

No, both searches are on Yahoo!

I was just comparing hits with Google to indicate that virtually nothing is coming from Yahoo compared to what you would expect.

These are good observations jcfriedly and pretty much match my own findings with Yahoo Lately.

Yahoo currently has over 80 pages of my site in it's index with the site: command but for some reason only a select few of these pages are ever allowed to show up for their respective keywords, ( interestingly enough - the pages that do show seem to be the ones that were "grandfathered" into the Yahoo index from the original Inktomi database )

The pages that Yahoo does allow to show for their respective keywords seem of late to produce less traffic than what they did a few weeks ago even though their possitions have remained pretty much the same..........hmmmm

I don't want to start any conspiracy theories here but I would love to know how many of the pages Yahoo does show for various keyword combo's that my pages don't are on it's PFI/CPC scheme.

Whitey,

If misery loves company, I guess I'm glad to have some company.

As for your "conspiracy theories", they may be true but I can guarantee you that my problems have nothing to do with cost-per-click advertising. The searches I am performing are on extremely obscure word phrases that nobody would buy.

In fact, if I understand your potential concern correctly, you can do a little test yourself by picking a phrase that can't possibly be purchased by anyone ("that can't possibly be purchased by anyone" is a good example of one) and see if your page appears in the SERPs when seaching under that versus searching under a more common keyword or key phrase that might have been bought by an advertiser.

What I've been finding with Yahoo is that if I type in the keyword combo that a page was optimised for between " " - ( as an exact phrase) then my page will show up usually pretty high in the serps, however if I just type the phrase in without caps then apart from a couple of pages I'm nowhere.

At first I thought it could be some form of over optimisation penalty levied against me but I do see pages that are allowed to show have equal or more on-page optimisation than mine, so I guess the answer to the puzzle is somewhat more criptic.

As a footnote, I have a feeling that starting a couple of weeks ago Yahoo has been doing something similar to what Google did with it's "florida" update so I recon the best thing to do at the moment is watch and wait.

Ummm inurl:domain.com shouldnt return anything and
you need http:// in from of www.domain.com if you want to return the site listings in yahoo

example site:http://www.seo-guy.com woohoo 11,000 pages! hehe, hope that answers your question

Thanks SEO-guy. Curiouser and curiouser.

site:domain.com appears to work as well as site:URL (20,000 listings from my site). SEO-guy recommended that you "need" to write it this way

site:http://www.domain.com

Since the other two methods returned results, I was skeptical that there would be a difference, but sure enough, site:URL returns 63,000 listings. Why the difference?

More importantly, these listings don't generate many hits (again, about 1% what Google generates). For the most part, the listings from my site do not turn up in the SERPs even thought they are indexed by Yahoo. What gives?