followgreg - 8:03 am on Mar 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Guys,

Here are the facts about one of my company's websites:

- We were included in one of the hand coded 1st page for 2 very competitive keywords - Which means Yahoo intentionally decided to have us on the 1st page...so we were quite happy, though it was totally legitimate and consistent with GG and MSN

- The 1st page of Yahoo for these 2 keywords did not move one inch for about 1 year :)...still good.

- Yesterday I queried Yahoo for these keywords and the site was totally gone along with 2 competitors, all replaced.

>>So far I would say fine, they decided that we had enough free traffic from their pitiful engine which is Ok. Even though they did not care to notice that only 12 websites really sell our products online, the rest are affiliates and apparently the 'editor' could not make the difference -> my point is if you review an industry and hand code results at least do it RIGHT.

What bothers me is both the intention and the results after 10+ positions.
The intention is dishonest, but they do what they want we do not rely on their traffic so much, MSN provides as well as them on this market and Google does so much better!
The 10+ results are showing a complete bunch of crap, totally irrelevant to the queries, for that matter I consider Yahoo like the worst search engine by far, they seem to be unable to make of anything except local searches and even then Yellow pages do good too, no need to be a so called 'search engine'.

I simply wonder when the mascarade will end. It's pitiful and dishonest.
Even on their end, their Yahoo Slurp hammering websites like no other bot ever did while not (or so little) refreshing their index must be ridiculously expensive for a total waste.

Possibly their business model is to keep webmasters busy thinking that eventually Yahoo will reflect their website on the SERP while what really requires resources, investment AND some brain activity on their end is not in their plans: searching for a real algo, undertanding how the internet works, building a real bot based on real site activity and popularity.

My 2 cents, It needed to be said one day, especially for those who did not know yet that Yahoo, is slow and hand codes popular searches.