Update Tim - Yahoo Update

Noticing changes across the board for a number of industries

[nuevojefe]

Some pretty signficant changes across the board. Doesn't seem much of an improvement in most of the sectors i've checked so far.

Definitely some jumps though, still trying to determine what factors may be more/less at play.

[Rollo]

Yes, I've noticed these, very significant changes. Yahoo SERPS tend to be stable to the point of staleness, so it's pretty surprising. I saw a set of results yesterday, they were different today, and both of which were differnt that the results holding for the last couple months.

I've been in the #1 spot for a competative phrase for many months, disappeared, not I'm back, but the subpage that had been #1 has been replaced by the index page now at #4. Strange.

[MLHmptn]

Very significant changes! I am very pleased to see that some of my sites have jumped out of the 50's range to the first page. Now if I could just get Google to follow suit! :>

[newwebster]

Looks like a step backwords in my area. I hope they are going to still tweak this thing out. Yahoo has completely different results from positiontech pure search for some searches whereas in the past these were fairly close to matching with some sites being filtered out of positiontech for the Yahoo search. The ranking is completely different. If they would switch to the positiontech results with some filtering then the results would be much improved.

[1milehgh80210]

Looks to me like domain-name, and Title are even more important than before.

[diddlydazz]

major shifts in some of the areas im watching

serps look like an improvement at first glance.

nice press release

It is important to have a dialog with publishers who rely on our product to send them visitors and that these content providers provide us with valuable feedback on our search products.

taken from the link provided by Imaster

ahem...paying attention google ;o)

[hughie]

big big big changes, i'm doing well everywhere i want to be doing well which is very nice, seems on-page SEO is much more important.

Seems very similar to MSN's results.

Hughie

[itisgene]

Hmm...bad timing..
one of my main sites was down for 7 days and it lost all the rankings and backlinks to other sites, too.

Bad...

[nuevojefe]

Imaster,

thanks, that's significant news, missed it entirely!

[stuntdubl]

announcement

I think this marks the first time ever that an update has been announced. Another example of how Yahoo is trying to communicate with SEO's despite the obvious reasons not to.

I vote we name the yahoo update: Update Tim

A very polite announcement, in my opinion, representative of Y's increasing willingness to communicate with webmasters and SEO's. Nice job guys.

[edited by: stuntdubl at 7:46 pm (utc) on April 1, 2005]

[nuevojefe]

Interestingly enough, I don't see much change if any in the areas that are manually edited until after the manually placed sites, from there on there are definitely changes.

[Kangol]

It would be great if Yahoo guys will come in here and start to communicate.
The SERPs on some high competitive terms I am monitoring are very very bad. I am sure that if we can work together Yahoo can solve some problems.

[catchmeifucan]

Two of my sites dropped a lot in indexed pages. one from 2000 - 200, the other from 800-150. Anyone has the same experiences?

[phbk9d]

I am seeing the same thing, from 2000 - 200 or so on my site. The worst is that my 1800 or so pages that were dropped are my main content pages. The 200 are not really loaded with tons of unique content, but the others have really unique content.

I also ranked #1-#4 for all of my keywords before for those pages that were dropped, but now since those pages are dropped, we can't rank for those keywords since those are the pages we targeted.

Anyone think they will keep adding more pages to the index? Slurp is still visiting.

[BillyS]

I follow the pages index daily in Yahoo. More than doubled from yesterday to today - from 330 to 600 pages. The site has roughly 850 pages of content.

Seems to me that Yahoo almost started "fresh" with this update, giving new sites a chance to compete with established ones.

My traffic from Yahoo is up nearly 5 fold today (from around 30 to 150 uniques). I don't spam blogs, just a site targeting 13 phrases (I don't believe in bad luck) with over 40 pages of content dedicated to each phrase (roughly 600 words per page).

Right now I am ranking well for 4 of those 13 phrases. The site is totally white hat. Personally, I like the results.

[blend27]

Great update, I am back in bussiness, top 15 on 15 phrases.

P.S.

I also found something interesting inside HTML at Yahoo Directory for Canada.
here how HTML looks like in general on 4 levels deep in to it

<li><img width=15 height=9 alt="Canada" src=http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/ca/features/ca_flag.gif>
&nbsp;<a href="http://www.weidgets.tld">link text</a></a>

Wonder if that is proper HTML to link to another site?

[onebaldguy]

I am amazed at the spam that was allowed to surface (not in all areas, but a few industries). Some of our secondary sites are beating out our primary sites. Which doesn't bother me one bit, but it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Not sure if they will stay. Hopefully those of you that were helped in the update will keep your positions (unless you are one of the guys cloaking the pages in a few of these industries). Cloaked pages can squeak by in a variety of industries, but I don't imagine they will allow them to continue ranking for some of these competitive keywords.

Thanks for the open communication Tim. That is great to see coming from a Search Engine!

[robotsdobetter]

I also have seen some major changes on the keywords I watch. I think Yahoo! improved it a LITTLE, but still see some Spam. My site has jumped from 10, 12, 30, 20 and back to 10 on the site's main keyword. It looks like link popularity may be playing a bigger role in the ranking.

[herb]

Y sent one of our sites 635 visitors a day on average for March. At its current rate we should make 432 for today. Yesterday it was showing 2340 pages in the index, today it's at 660. Strange thing, slurp picked up 18,000+ pages in March. I was expecting great things on this update. I wonder, if I had banned slurp in robots.txt would the 2340 pages still be there.

[newbieatseo]

Want to see some of the great results from this update? Take a look at the phrase: <snip>

Look at the first 800 or so listings. I got tired of looking after that and didn't look any further.

[edited by: martinibuster at 11:06 pm (utc) on April 1, 2005]
[edit reason] Please, no specifics. Thanks for understanding. [/edit]

[aleksl]

First, I see results jumping now - 2 different datacenters?

On our major KW (2 words, 52 million results in Y!) there's a site fluctuating between positions 2 and 3 that has nothing to do with the keyword. Ok, almost nothing, it mentions both words on the page.

Also, fluctuating with it at #2 and 3 somewhat connected in theme site, much closer to the main KW but of a lower quality than many sites below, and that has traditionally been not higher that page 2-3 in G or MSN.

For other sites: for KW similar to "craft widgets" a site "craftwidgets.com" not even in top 50, so there's maybe some weight to domain, but other factors can easily outweight it. Also, SERPs are filled with widget makers and affiliates, but nothing about "craft" or how you can "craft great widgets" or do your own "widgety craft" in top 30 (craft is not a real word here).

Also, one affiliate site owns positions 1 and 4 in SERPs - the guy must be making a killing.

Still no traffic from Y

[crobb305]

Take a look at the phrase: free background check ... Look at the first 800 or so listings. I got tired of looking after that and didn't look any further.

Haha. Yeah, I see crap like that on other keywords too. Bad changes, hopefully it is still tweaking.

[herb]

Look at the first 800 or so listings.

I'll say one thing they do have a bunch of domains!

[esllou]

we only got back into the index after early Feb.

we were going up 3-6 pages per day and had got up to c.260 yesterday.

Now at 27!

This, on a 2500 page site, PR6

here we go again....

[steveb]

The good news, Yahoo gets close to fully indexing domains under 1000 pages, making it almost as good as Google and much better than MSN on the indexing front.

The bad news, if an area is aggressively subdomain and/or blog spammed, the results are terrible. For one term, the first three results are
word1-word2-word3.somefreehost.net
word4-word2-word3.somefreehost.net
word5-word2-word3.somefreehost.net
with all three being duplicates (triplicates).

In contrast, in areas no heavily spammed, the results look good.

[edited by: steveb at 11:32 pm (utc) on April 1, 2005]

[jonathanleger]

Lots more indexed pages for my sites showing up now.

[zulufox]

Before: Horrible
After: Horrible

I have the only page in the world about Blue Widgets, Google sends me hundreds of people a day to this page, but when I type the EXACT phrase in yahoo I get only spam... shessh.

[markus007]

I used to hold first spot for some of the hardest terms to seo for. After this update i got shifted way down. Looks like about 40% spam, about the same as before the update.

[Tigrou]

Randomly, one site has changed on different DCs "correctly" based upon work put in by me/competitors, but in at least one DC site can no longer be found. It's just "gone" since I first checked this morning.

Strange. Assume it is just a hiccup.

CF

[RichTC]

WELL DONE YAHOOO!

A superb improvement. Less spam, less doorway pages, less keyword stuffed cr@p in the SERPS. Its great to see good quality sites featuring in the index at long last.

For the sector i watch its a drastic improvement, i can now use the results for once - this is a superb update.

It looks to me that some real poor quality sites that have sat in top positions in Yahoo due to dodgy SEO methods have at last been cleared from the index.

Quality, deep rich content sites are moving forwards - a refreshing change.

Superb!