ron_ron - 4:36 pm on May 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

It's funny, I just had a long discussion on the phone today with Rakuten. We talked about what the effect of this would be once it happened. But it must have happened even before we talked about it. They are naturally worried. Yahoo is locatted in the same building they are but they can't even talk about it. Rakuten has a lot to lose should the rankings change for their mall sites. They are worried.

For my Japanese sites, the results are both good and bad. The increase in categories before the regular SERP's has put my sites further down. However, my main site is still ranking number one after the categories, just where I was on Google. My other site came up some but it is pretty much the same as on Google. Since I optimize my English and Japanese sites the same way, I find that I rank just about the same on both Yahoos as I do on both Googles. For me, both search engines work about the same.

My main site has over 1,000 pages on Google and I find it it also has about that many pages on the new YahooJapan engine. Other than the flood of categories, Yahoo seems to work about the same as Google. I wish they would get rid of those stupid categories. They clutter up the SERPs in my openion.

I will have a look the server logs tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how this change will affect sales. As far as today is concerned, sales were about same as always.