The Mysterious H=0, H=1, and H=2 Suffixes in Yahoo Serp URL Strings

What Do They Mean?

[extremegolfer]

In Yahoo's results you will notice the tracking URLs that have H equals 0, H equals 1, H equalss 2 etc. What do they mean? I understand most people have not even noticed these, but for those that have, what are your comments.

[internetheaven]

The supporters forum has an extensive thread on this:

[webmasterworld.com...]

so it had been noticed some time ago, strange that no-one started a similar thread out here until now.

The jist of it is that Yahoo is giving certain sites a "booster" so that they always rank highly for certain keywords. Many think this is to increase relevancy, others think it is Yahoo's way of stopping people being able to "work out" their algorithm by throwing in a couple of manual changes.

[outland88]

Under one major major keyword I do business in 63 of the top 100 Yahoo results are mirror pages from the same company. All of the sites have a H2, H3. When you can do something like that under a major keyword that’s not a search engine. That’s pay for inclusion and paid spamming. Yahoo’s conning people. Most quality sites that are missing would quickly displace these results because of clean optimization.

[martinibuster]

The H2 H3 thingys are not strictly paid for inclusion. There are sites in the serps with those marks that I know for a fact are not PFI.

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:16 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]

[kevinpate]

whatever H=3 means, it is definitely not a PFI code.

A nfp site I'm aware of has never been pfi or listed in Y! directory. The tracking info for its organic serp listing shows the H=3 segment right after the R=* segment all the same.

[extremegolfer]

Doing further research on a few sites we own, a couple of which were submitted to sitematch, the h1 was preceeded with the word "sitematch" on the two that were submitted to sitemach. Yet we also have other non-sitematch submitted sites that are fluctuating between h1, h2, and h3. In essence, these are proabably just tracking codes. I tend to believe they are simply tracking click popularity (hits/hour) volume for a given interval of time...