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I don't know what's going to happen as Y adds more paid results but for now their results are excellent.
The observation isn't based on my sites, half of my sites aren't even in Yahoo but are in Google. This is based on comparing the two against equal searches.
How quickly the sand shifts...
-s-
I have to agree with the comment "just like G a few months ago."
Run a few searches. Not from where I'm sitting.
Agreed!
SERP on Y are sudeenly much, much better than what was seen a few days ago.
Does anyone - Tim - YahooMike know why? Can this be reasonably explained?
Thank you Yahoo - a little relief goes a long, long way!
ARC
I did a search under a very popular keyword and seven of the top twenty results were from the same company. Six of the results wern't even remotely related to the keyword. The amount of spam is astounding. Google leaves Yahoo in the dust. They're not even serious contenders compared to ATW, AV, and Ask.
I'm afraid I have to agree with this 100%. Perhaps people who report good results via Yahoo can suggest what particular SUBJECT they're searching. My subject is <snip>.
I spent about 6 hours during the previous weekend testing Yahoo, searching for many popular (taken from Overture) different keywords (<snip> related) and visiting the first 40 sites (2 pages) presented in the results.
I can honestly say that if I were an actual potential customer, I'd have given up trying to locate useful info...
Yahoo seems to favor things like keyword density and "traditional" SEO (adding kw everywhere) and seems to ignore inbound links (many of the top40 had PR 2-3). Therefore the top40 is dominated by "spammy" sites.
Plus it gives many results from the same website.
Regards, D
[edited by: Woz at 12:55 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics please [/edit]
I saw this too, G index of one site that had 6 pages indexed at Y! befoe, now 22,000 (same number as in G and same pages, urls)...
Maybe they poured in existing index data from a slightly older G index clone...
I have emails in to both Yahoo and Ink's spam departments (and the webmasterworldfeedback one). Haven't heard back from Ink. Got a single line email back from the WebmasterWorld@yahoo address saying they are aware of the spam problems in the category and have "copied the spam department" on it. That was 7-9 days ago and I have only noticed it get worse. I also have talked for endless hours with PositionTech and Overture people. PositionTech says its an Ink/Yahoo problem. Overture says "must be something you did..." (we didn't DO anything...)
What seems to be happening is that "someone" (or some crooked SEOs) have been able to "feed" Ink's index with a bunch of duplicated content pages. Some searches I do come back with 7 out of the first 10 results going to exactly the same URL redirect, but with the following pattern in the SERPs (example company):
#1 [example.com...]
#2 [example.com...]
#3 [example.com...]
#4 [example.com...]
and so on...
Just plain awful results. Hopefully, they get these things straightened up soon...
my .02
[edited by: Woz at 1:41 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics please / examplified URLs [/edit]
Loads of spam, good sites that were in Google Yahoo are not
even showing up at all, because of old Ink BS penalties....
My vote is still out....I'll see after April 15th
The results we were looking at this morning looked really clean for our retail marketplace.
However, sometime later the search function was down on Yahoo and we simply thought it was us....
However, now that the search page is up... the results did a 360 degree turn....
We are seeing Google look alike rankings
We are seeing over 200 less page for our site
Does anyone know what has been going on at Yahoo today?
Obviously they are tinkering - but at the same time they seem to be creating havoc!
I am curious why they wouln't have just worked all this stuff out before severing ties with Google?
Bravado?
Each visit is a vote of approval, right?!
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out :)
Each visit is a vote of approval, right?!
Doubt it. Have you never clicked on a link from a search engine, looked at the home page, and decided that's not what you were looking for?
Hardly a vote of approval.
Yep. I changed to the Yahoo toolbar and removed google last week on my main machine. I have not yet gotten around to switching on this one but this old thing hardly ever gets used.
Me. But the user isn't losing so I cant really complain.
My subject is <snip> .I spent about 6 hours during the previous weekend testing Yahoo, searching for many popular (taken from Overture) different keywords (<snip> related) and visiting the first 40 sites (2 pages) presented in the results.
dhatz, did you check the SERPS today? They have changed dramatically since the weekend for <snip> related searches, but still seem to be bouncing back and forth between new and old results.
I am finding just the opposite when the "new" results are showing. Today for several of the terms that I follow, a site that normally had 4 listings in the top 10 results fell to 1 listing on page 2. Yahoo is obviously not using G's uber-filter, so some spam creeps in, but the search results are starting to appear much more relevant to me. In my area (<snip>), Google's results are terrible.
Of course now, Yahoo's SERPS have switched back to the "old" results, which are more spammy, IMHO.
[edited by: Woz at 1:00 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics please [/edit]
dhatz, did you check the SERPS today? They have changed dramatically since the weekend for <snip> related searches, but still seem to be bouncing back and forth between new and old results.
Judging from the feedback here, Yahoo SERPs constantly change and I'll put no more time "researching" SERPs and wait until 15-Apr-2004 before drawing any conclusions.
Anyway here's the latest feedback:
I spent another 2 hours yesterday (17-Mar-2004 20:00 to 22:00 GMT) searching and evaluating results of <snip> related searches for my country, <snip>. I chose popular kw from Overture (ie those actually USED by real people to search for info) plus other simple searches, e.g. "<area> hotels".
In the top-40, only 10% of the results would I characterize as "useful". The rest were basically without content, of the [keyword-here.tld...] type and the same in the web-page itself, and pagerank of 0-3. Several URLs from the same company (different domains, same "content"). And there were about 20% of results completely out of context, e.g. pages for Prague or London (when i was searching for areas in Greece)
I just checked and the results right now, seem different than yesterday, but have the same problems described above.
I'll wait until 15-Apr before drawing conclusions.
D.
[edited by: Woz at 1:01 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] no specific please [/edit]
Since the Google (?)update that took place from March 11th to March 14th, I've seen my Google traffic, which was already very good, almost double! I don't know why I seem to be an anomaly. Does anyone else have visitor results like this?
So as good as Y looks now - I wonder what it will look like in a couple of months with an ever-changing Internet to deal with...
You just can't charge for it and give it away too...
-s-
I'm not sure it's whether I have a .ca website which is hosted in Canada, but Yahoo for me is almost a zero referer. I do not pay to be registered, but I have not yet seen the new Yahoo! spider although the Inktomi spider has always visited regularly and extensively.
Now that you mention it, i'd like to add that when YahooSearch results were still powered by Google (these stats are for period Jan-2003 until Oct-2003), it was about 10% of the referrals, Googles were about 70% and the other 20% was split between the rest (AOLsearch, MSN, ATW, Ask and regular links from sites and directories like ODP and Yahoo)
This is based on a sample of 250.000 unique IPs with a bias towards European users.
The Yahoo Spider visits the site (which btw is listed in DMOZ, Yahoo directory and has MANY inbound links) daily, but still its cache reports the pages back from Jan-2004. During the last two months log shows 7171 visits from YahooSlurp vs 7540 of Googlebot, so they're both doing a good job imo.
Nowadays YahooSearch is about 5% of the referrals (down from 10% of referrals last year).
D
This comparision would be meaningless, if you didn't maintain the pretty much the same ranking on serps over a bunch of powerful keywords.
>YahooSearch is about 5% of the referrals (down from 10% of referrals last year).
This comparision would be meaningless, if you didn't maintain the pretty much the same ranking on serps over a bunch of powerful keywords.
My interpretation of those stats was:
1. During 2003, of all referrals, almost 70% came from Googles (both .com and regionals) and a bit over 10% from YahooSearch. I assume (but don't know for sure) that a year ago Yahoo and Google SERPs were 100% identical, so this is a correct way to measure "popularity" of Google vs Yahoo during 2003 for our audience. Correct?
2. Nowadays, our site's ranking on "new Yahoo" SERPs is bad, so I can't draw any conclusions about the popularity of each engine for our audience.
Personally, although I'm a loyal user of Google because it has helped me FIND REAL INFO FOR FREE over all those years (GREAT search engine, archive of Usenet news from dejanews etc), as a business-person I'd welcome the competition from a quality Yahoo Search
D.
