Yahoo Most Popular

Link Popularity or Click Thru's

[JK_Bowman]

Hey Gang,

One of my sites turns up in Yahoo's Most Popular section. At the top of the list even. But I have no idea what measurement they used to determine that that.

Does anyone know if it is based on click-thru's or is link popularity also a factor? I see from previous threads that folks have documented that Yahoo is measuring Click Thru's, but I am wondering if this is the only criteria they use to establish "Most Popular"

Also, if they are measuring click thrus - do you know if they are also taking a measurement for how long someone stays on a site before they return to the index?

Thanks. And keep rockin! :)

[2_much]

Interesting questions...the results that show up in "Most Popular" are different from those that show up in the first page of the search results.
They seem to have 2 "ranking" algos at play. Any ideas, anyone?

[JamesR]

Some categories do not have most popular....I think it is click tracking. Maybe counting what sites are clicked on after a visitor arrives in a category and then putting those at the top, just a guess.

[skibum]

Intuition would tell me, that it's got something to do with click throughs. I don't think YAHOO! uses any Page Rank type stuff for regular listings, so I would guess they don't for popular listings either.

[WebGuerrilla]

They started out by tracking click activity of search results. If you do a search and mouse over the link you will see the tracking id and search phrase included in the url. Originally, when they first started this, it was only in search results. Category listings were still linked directly to the site with no tracking code.

However, they have recently change that. Now, even if you drill down into a category all links contain the code. It is actually a pretty cool system because they now have better control over which category matches are displayed at the top. Tracking the keyword from the search lets them determine which categories best relate to common search terms. Once you are in the category, they track which listings gets clicked on the most, and those listings eventually get promoted to the most popular status.

[skibum]

WebGuerrilla - Thanks for the post. That's how I thought YAHOO! was using the algo to juggle results, but wasn't totally sure. It makes perfect sense.

[Brett_Tabke]

Anyone else hit that most popular category? Do you find that you get the "cool" star more often then back in the category listings? Or don't you think that is related? (I kinda do - happened three times now to clients)

[2_much]

I've hit "most popular" on a few categories...not very exciting...Didn't see an increase of hits when this occurred...
Brett, what do you mean here?
"Do you find that you get the "cool" star more often then back in the category listings? "