Yahoo & Grammar

Does Yahoo Detect Proper Grammar

[Fred_B]

</lurk>

Greetings, I've had a client's site's traffic from Yahoo drop significantly. I was not the orginal person who optimized the site; so, while looking for a cause of possible penalty, I noticed that the title and description tags had keyword phrases listed without concern for grammar.

Word is that traffic for this site had been growing steadily (mostly from Yahoo) and is now zero.

Am I correct in suspecting that Yahoo can detect improper use of grammar thus resulting in the fall?
Or, have the recent Yahoo index updates perhaps moved pages up that had better SEO? Combination of both?

[robotsdobetter]

I think it would be hard for them to do this at this time. I don't think this would make sense because there are a lot of web pages that don't have good grammar and provide great information. Look around yourself, most people can't spell that great anyway, people could leave comments with bad grammar, does that mean that web page isn't useful because of that? Just look at Webmaster World, there many here that are not good at grammar, but it still ranks well.

His/her drop was likely due to the Yahoo index update, grammar or spelling would be the last thing I would consider. It could be that some of the sites that link to their web site are no longer looked at as high as they once were or the web site is linking out to a spamming web site(s).

[Fred_B]

Thanks for your reply. When i say bad grammar, i dont mean average poor writing skills, I mean something like this in the title and descrition:

"Widgets & Stuff - Green Widgets Blue Widgets Round Widgets Square Widgets Triangle Widgets"

In other words title and description do not read like a sentence designed for humans.

[steve]

Its more likely that repeating 'widgets' too often has tripped a filter.

Try not to repeat a word more than twice.

Or try to use widget, widgets, widgetting, widgeter, etc.

[Fred_B]

thanks steve, that should have been obvious, "widgets" is repeated 4x in the title. The grammar question was kind of a tangent / curiosity. I dont know yahoo quite as well as I know google.

[AndAgain]

"Does Yahoo Detect Proper Grammar"

Even if they are not right now, do you not
expect them to in the future?

Also, if this is the case why not just do it right now instead of getting the shaft later and be forced to do it right under the stresses stemming from an abrupt loss in traffic?

[cyberfyber]

Methinks it'd be extremely hard for Yahoo or any other SE to get around to doing this successfully for the same reasons that a grammar checker in something such as MS Word isn't reliable either.

Now of course if you're talking about blatant grammatical errors then that might be a whole 'nother story.

[caveman]

If you've ever had a look at cloaked pages that do well in Y!, then you gotta know that Y! ain't usin' grammar checkers. They may employ some very basic 'natural language' filters, but the spammers know that these are insanely easy to get around. I know, because the spammers have told me so. ;-)