Anyone Seeing Yahoo Serps Bouncing Around?

Seeing radical flux - or is it just me?

[mark1615]

We a few sites that do very well in Yahoo. They did pretty well until the last update when they started to do very well - all top 10, many top 5, some significant #1s. Then last Monday they all dropped and the cache of many pages reverted to pages that were weeks or months old. I wasn't too concerned since - sadly - I have seen this before with Yahoo where they inexplicably revert to an old cache and your SERPS suffer until they come back to the current version. Then earlier this week, we had big changes - back to where we were and in many case above. So now here is the strange part, today the results for this site are all over the place. Within 2 hours results have gone, on one term from #9 to #48 to #213 and back to #48. For another from #1 to #15 to #700 to #15 and on and on. They are all over the place. And here is the kicker - the results on Overture and MSN are what they were yesterday. Questions:

1) Anyone else seeing stuff like this?
2) Any idea why?

One other item, they are no longer showing a cache for most of these pages. When and why does the cache go away?

[GerBot]

I've seen some big movements across all my sites over the last 7 days.
Sites going from #1 to #90 now at #9.

Seems like Y! had a few things waiting to go live in the new year.

[McMohan]

My site was down for a day on Dec 15th. Until the first week of January, my site was doing great on Yahoo, ranking #1 for some money keywords. All of a sudden Yahoo decided to cache my site for the day when the site was down and ranks all but vanished. Today I see even the cache too vanished and its only showing the description provided in the Yahoo directory listing. Hoping that ranks will return when Yahoo updates the cache.

Hope none similar has happened with your site?

Mc

[mark1615]

Our situation is slightly different - the cache of most our pages disappeared and with it most the good rankings. It is very strange. And what is more, MSN is still showing the old Yahoo SERPs, that is, the Yahoo SERPs as of 5 days ago. We are thinking/hoping that when they cache the pages again things will change. But would like to know:

a. Why did the caches disappear?
b. Why is MSN still showing the old SERPs? (We're not complaining of course, but it is curious)

[webnewton]

i too can see some significant movement. Havent' got the time to go through it properly though. I've started linking Yahoo for the qality of its results and activity of its bot.

[IRWINjim]

I'm currently seeing different results throughout the day, on different computers and when I use different browsers.

It is typical for Yahoo to show different results for different browsers?

[Uber_SEO]

I'm seeing the exact same thing. I had a site that ranked well (top 10) in Yahoo for a lot of core terms. Then, since the update, we dropped to around 50th. Last week I checked the SERPs, and within a 5 minute period, we dropped from 50th, down to around 250th, where we've now remained.

There have been some minor fluctations to this position, but nothing that has seen us enter the top 100 again. I thought I was dreaming when I saw it happen, but obviously not!

[petehall]

I see updated results at the moment.

They seem quite stable though as I've not noticed any fluctuations.

[Freedom]

Wow, major changes for my sites across 100s to 1,000s of pages. The last algo change for Yahoo, Dec. 15, really favored my sites. Now, it looks like they are going into the toilet.

[JenniferL]

Major movement for one of my key terms. It keeps moving from the top ten into complete oblivian. Every time I look it has changed again!

[bluestate]

i have noticed a drop in top ranked pages on yahoo. many of our pages were in the top 10 and now they have all dropped. has anyone noticed on yahoo that the some of the web pages in the top 10, contain very few of the key words in the content? any idea on when this will be updated or revised?

[mark1615]

We still see movement. Here is something we have noticed in our areas which is confusing to us at this time - but we're studying: (This is a very competitive term with about 3.5MM results)

1) New top 20 - there was group of about 30 or so sites that shared the top 20 and changed positions. Most are gone. Many good players too.
2) Stripped down pages seem be at the top.
3) Very few links - like less than 10 in some cases.

Strange. Keywords don't seem to relevant. Metatags don't seem relevant. Internal and external links don't seem relevant. To be honest, it looks almost totally random.

Thoughts?

[itisgene]

Clear your cache for all yahoo cookies.
Problem is not all users would remove yahoo cookies to see your results.

[twebdonny]

MSN search is beginning to flux in it's beta results.
That much I am noticing today.

[LouMinatti]

It is very strange. We had a couple hundred pages indexed in Yahoo, now there are only 3. And the cache is from November. The result is we've dropped way down for our keywords.

Our primary competitor also had hundreds of indexed pages, and while they still remain in the top for keywords, their indexed page count has dropped to 11.

There doesn't appear to be any method behind the dropped pages. Some are top-level, some of the ones that are still indexed are buried back under three directory levels.

Neither us nor our competitor are affiliate spammers. We have lots of good content for the widgets we manufacture, unique content on each page. I think Yahoo had a screw-up.