Yahoo And The Parsing Issue

[kevs 0]

I have a few websites and one that is coming to the top of the Google & Yahoo results is one I don't want to.

 

I know that if I put an underscore between my first and last name, it'll probably disappear from Google.

 

But I also remember that Yahoo parses underscores. So if this does not work with Yahoo, does anyone have any ideas? thanks.

[EGOL 917]

Why don't you just build a few links into the one that you want to rank?

[Respree 3]

I know that if I put an underscore between my first and last name, it'll probably disappear from Google.

 

Not sure if I'd agree with that.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13530_3-9748779-28.html

[kevs 0]

Resree, dang, so the underscores now wont reduce ranking or hide things anymore?

 

What about dashes, or what about anything?

 

I can't make the other site beat the current site without putting in hundreds of hours of work. The first site is also 10 years older and html based vs flash.

[Respree 3]

Seems odd you don't want to be found.

 

Maybe its better to go in another direction.

 

From: firstname-lastname.html

To: go-away.html

 

Or, to simply put the page in a directory where you can exclude it from being indexed in the first place (via robots.txt).

[kevs 0]

You are not understanding, don't know if I have energy to explain., but the site needs to be indexed ( ie when people do a product/service search "shoes New York" for example . I just don't want this site being the top result when people type in my actual name "john smith"

 

I have other sites that I want to be #1, & #2 for my name search.

 

So I just put an underscore in Title homepage John_Smith shoes.

 

And I did same for the homepage for text on page.

 

And I even did a sitewide underscore. (working on a sitewide title underscore)

 

Only thing that worries me is that the site is called johnsmith.com

 

And it's has always for years come up #1 for searches on my name, so I'm worred this may not be easy to do.

 

( john smith is just an example name. In short, I still need the older site to index and SEO well, but if someone hears about me from a friend, referral, I now have newer, better designed flash sites I would prefer getting the #1 rank on a pure name search) I have put in an email to the desingers of my new flash sites, but I "think" it will be easier to reduce the rank of the older html site for john smith, than to raise it of the newer flash site. I'm not sure of anything really yet.

[bwelford 161]

To expand on Egol's suggestions above of putting more links to the new website., you could perhaps create a new 'splash page' on the old site as the 'home page'. That splash page would offer the choice of going to the new website or of going into the old website. You would also have to change the URL of the old website home page.

 

The other advantage of this approach is that your new splash page would likely lose ranking anyway given that it had less content.

 

Would that perhaps achieve the various objectives you have, kevs?

[kevs 0]

thanks Barry, but no, your killing a fly with an atom bomb. I can't change the url of the old one. It still brings in lots of calls and is SEO great. I just want it to rank lower for my real name search.