cws3di - 6:00 am on Sep 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yes, dean, you are right.

I am not in the US, I have been seeing the new Yahoo for about a week now, waiting for the US to catch up. i.e. sometimes the foreign countries seems to be guinea pigs and we see weird things going on that are not yet launched in the US.

So, from my end, Yahoo is now showing the Ads - 3 across the top highlighted in blue, 8 to 10 down the right margin, and three more highlighted in blue across the bottom.

The entire area "above the fold" is the ADS. Organic SERPS being below the fold.

The SERPS are totally different. It looks as if a BIG plus has been given to very old sites. As you say, some are so old the owners seem to have forgotten they exist, look like they haven't been updated in 3 or 4 years. Others are updated, but the domains have existed for many years.

Backlinks also seem to play a more important role, but that may also be related to history - 5 year old sites will typically have alot more backlinks than 1 year old sites.

There also seems to be a BIG correlation to the top returns in various searches I have done - guess - the top sites have listings in the Yahoo Directory. In all fairness, I should also point out that many of those listings date back to the times before Yahoo was charging for directory listings. Hmmm Hmmm.

The second page is structured the same - next 10 organic results are still below the fold. But #11-20 look more like regular websites with reasonable up-to-date content, and not showing any Yahoo Directory listing.

Does anyone else around the world see this?