Yahoo Totally Different SERPs

Y SERP's Bouncing?

[natim]

Last 2 days weird things. Have 2 pc's on my desk one cable one dsl. Totally different results. Cleared cookies on both yet still getting totally different. Any ideas or anyone seeing similar?

[martinibuster]

Yahoo sometimes does up to a dozen tests a day.

[angiolo]

I have the same experience.

At office I get different results than at home. Probably depending on the IP.

here (in Italy) the standard results on Yahoo.com are the same as months ago. To check the US result I use an anonymizer software; results vary using the anonymizer in two different locations.

[Frequent]

I can't say as I've seen terribly stable results ever since the initial update began. I thought they'd stabilized earlier this week but the last two days has been crazy. Yahoo traffic off by about 75%.

Freq---

[angiolo]

Hi Frequent!

Where are you from?
At the beginning I though that everything was the same and here ( in Italy) eveything seem the same.

Bu very soon I realized that there was a big update. I browsed on yahoo using an anonymizer sowftare like www.anonymizer.com .

My opinion is that only robust sites had no trouble.

[ownerrim]

"My opinion is that only robust sites had no trouble."

Absolutely wrong. In many serps, very clean content-abundant sites have gone missing while pure crap has floated to the surface.

[CygnusX1]

We also have a very clean site of over 500 web-pages and are only getting 30 vistors a day. Way down from two months ago.

I can only hope that Yahoo list us back to were we belong.

[webpublisher]

CygnusX1 - same here

Dropped 2/3 of our normal Yahoo traffic.

The annoying thing is that we have been replaced by a load of spam / TE sites- basically sites set up with no intention of providing quality content.

[rjwmotor]

We also have dropped nearly 1/2 of our traffic from Y. Same thing, lots of duplicate sites and nearly unrelated sites for a specific kw I monitor.

[uk_webber]

I have also dropped!

I held number one position for 16m results for .com and .co.uk for one month with a very clean site, now it's nowhere in that result!

I assume once you have dropped down you can get back up..?

[artdog]

Had a couple positions return that were lost a month ago but still MIA on most. Hope the good old days are returning.

[MLHmptn]

Try the -asdf flag with your keyword search term and WALLA! Your position is back! Yahoo just can't seem to figure out that they screwed up their SERPS with this last algorithm change! MSN is making Yahoo look bad now!

Finish the update Yahoo!

[sunnyk]

I tried the -asdf flag with our keyword search term and our site is in the top ten compared being on 3rd and 5th pages. Can someone explain what -asdf flag does and what does it mean getting your site back with this flag. Is this some kind of penalty?

[martinibuster]

>>>Is this some kind of penalty?
No.
It's just what the serps would look like if they didn't filter out SEO'd websites (more or less). This was discovered a couple years ago in the Google serps, around Florida.

You may want to do a site search for asdf on WebmasterWorld. Here you go [google.com], I did it for you.
;)

[ownerrim]

yahoo seems more and more like something in the wastebasket that's too out of it to know where it is yet.

[sunnyk]

Thanks Marinibuster. We tried the -asdf flag only once and not 9 or 13 times with our keyword search term and our site is in the top ten compared being on 2nd, 3rd and 5th pages (we rank in top ten on all yahoo country searches, altavista, cnn and overture searches). Are we still in seo over optimized sandbox?

[rjwmotor]

Same here...was ranking top ten on several terms with quite a few #1's. Now for the same terms rankings are in the 30's,40's and beyond. A few months back did some seo on several pages(nothing blackhat) and it paid off very well. Now, as with others after this last update, those pages don't even appear in the serps. The pages that are ranked in the 30's and 40's are very basic unoptimized .php pages that never ranked b4. I just did that -asdf search and there are my old rankings with the old pages that no longer appear. What's funny is that these couple of pages that were optimized still rank well on G. Aren't they supposed to be the ones with all of the "heavy seo" filters? The sites on the first page of this kw aren't bad sites although many appear as if they were never optimized. I guess I "overoptimized" and will now pay for it.. Also noticed that for certain 3 word search phrases I monitor results are completely worthless after page 1.

[sunnyk]

Hello RJWMOTOR. How are you doing on all yahoo country searches, altavista, cnn and overture searches?

[rjwmotor]

I rank #2 on all of the above for a particular 2 word kw for a page I optimized a few months back. On Yahoo I rank #26 for a different page that has never been optimized but is related. This is a commerce site w/ different products. The page that was optimized was this particular kw's category page; the page on Y is an actual product page. At first I though maybe dup content penalty but the info one the category page is differnt then the product page. Over-optimization or what?

[sunnyk]

Thanks. I'm exactly in the same boat as you as site is doing well in google and more or less same as you on yahoo. I'm coming to the conclusion our site is over optimized. I checked our site after looking at "Yahoo Update Coda" thread and look at caveman's observation, looks like he is totally correct as far the kw's we follow on yahoo.

[Trey03]

martinibuster,

When you say over optimized what do you mean. Do you mean on page factors or off (links).

Im not convinced that it has to do with on page factors. I'll try to explain what I see in Yahoo's serps.

Ok my 4 word keywords are...
[blue red cool widgets]
[green yellow cool widgets]
[black brown cool widgets]

Ok my 3 word keywords are...
[blue red widgets]
[green yellow widgets]
[black brown widgets]

Ok my 2 word keywords are...
[blue red]
[green yellow]
[black brown]
[cool widgets]

Now Im going after alot of keywords from my homepage so my I prioritize my on page factors...

Title Tag: Cool Widgets blue red green yellow brown black

Before the update I was number one for both 3 and 4 word searches. I ranked in the top 5 for the 2 word searches.

After the update my 3 and 4 word keywords droped from the number 1 postion down to about 3 to 5. I lost about all my 2 word searches except for one.... cool widgets!

Now when I do -asdf search of any of the keyword phrases boom Im number 1.

Its hard to argue that there is a penalty for on page factors as my site is most optimized for "cool widgets" and less optimized for the 3 and 4 keyword phrases.

About off page factors... ok... I have a pretty big reciprocal link directory and I link from my homepage to 7 related autority sites that link back to mine from theirs. I have plenty of links for the 3 and 4 word phrases. Its all mixed up pretty evenly. Now I do have alot of links that include "cool widgets" but none that say only "cool widgets".

Im really confused on what Im seeing. Im getting out ranked by poorer quality mom and pop sites that have very few links and use moderate seo on onpage factors. I dont however see any spam pages. Everything is authentic and related but the sites at the top arent the best ones out there.

I thought that I might have a bad apple in my recip directory and this is causing a penalty but you guys are seeing the same as I.

However, I just checked the rankings of the autority sites that I link to from my homepage and it seems they were hit pretty bad too. I dont know.

So... What are you guys seeing? Do you guys have recip directories? Do you guys crosslink from your homepage? What kind of filter/penalty is it? And where do we go from here?

Thanks

Trey

[deanril]

Im about in the same boat as you with the new Yahoo Serps. Cant make heads or tells of it, definately a filter, do -asdf all is well.

Im seeing OLD sites with barely any Keywords or structure in the front page serps. And noone has touched these old sites in like years..

I say wait it out, dont do anything, they cant possibly serve this up for too much longer before they se an overall drop in business because people cant find what they are looking for.

I also think its for $$$$$ keywords, for the smaller ones I havent really been affected, I think they are targeting the big dollar keywords for sure, and puposely serving up garbage to boost ad sales.

[Iguana]

I'm don't think the -asdf thing is evidence of a filter as such. I think they are interpreted as searches for different things. "green widget" is a search for the phrase red widget (and will serve you sponsored results about red widget) whereas "green widgets -asdf" will give you a search for the word "green" and the word "widget".

In the results I'm examining when I use -asdf the big losers are a site for green tea and a bbc.co.uk page. Without the -asdf all the results are about green widgets and no mention of green tea. I think the green tea and the bbc pages are kicking in because they are authority sites and they have the two words in.

Just a reminder, when -asdf was used in Google it produced 2 entirely different sets of results - not a filtered set.

[sunnyk]

When I just use - (negative sgn) after the kw it shows our site in the top 5 for most of the kws we track and when I use + (positive sign) it shows the current results where our site is on 5th page for most of the kws. I don't have to use -asdf thirteen times. Can someone explain.

[Garytt]

I'm having the same problem as you guys. Was #1 for several of my targeted KW in a competitive industry. Now on the second page on some and dropped to #5 or 6 for some. I had a problem with Google about a year ago where I was dropped almost entirely out of any search except the name of my site, and it didn't come up first for that. I thought I may be having problems at that time because of another site I had that was similar and hosted on the same server. During this time my Yahoo #1 rankings kept me alive. I took care of the problem with google and now i'm doing fine but falling in Yahoo. I'll just wait and see what happens next but I'm not going to start changing everything and screw up my Google rankings. These things always seem to work themselves out.

[MLHmptn]

2 months ago I thougth Yahoo's SERPS were the best I had ever seen on Yahoo! Today their SERPS are worse than GigaBlast! How can a one man crew provide more relevance than your search engine Yahoo!?

If this is the final set of SERPS Yahoo you are in dire straits!

On a side note realistically your revenue is going to go up because your forcing people into utilizing YSM! Taking a page out of Google's book!

[nzmatt]

Mysite droped from 5 - 31 (and falling).

Its a whitehat clean site and ranks well in both google and msn.

I have changed nothing, so I consider this a Yahoo change. I will wait. Reminds me of Google a bit.

[edd1]

Yahoo is falling into a very poor third place. Why? they don't have to do it. Come on Yahoo, fight back. Produce good results especially regionally and the rest will take care of itself.

[newwebster]

After 6 weeks with this algo and only a few minor changes in some areas to clean up obvious junk and spam, one has to wonder if these serps are in fact deliberate. This algo reeks of anti-seo in many areas. Unless you have a well known site or happen to get lucky during a manual adjustment for serp placement, you can forget about being ranked. I am seeing evidence that even something as simple as the title of the page having no weight for this algo. On page factors have been brought down to the minimum of weight, just enough to make the results accurate for specific searches that contain part numbers or specific brand names and models, etc. where back links are not a factor. Most of the weight seems to be coming from drill down link analysis whereby the landing page only has to have a slight relevancy to the search term(s). The full relevancy comes from applying the link data from one page to the next. This may or may not work for some serps as this opens the door for a lot of contextual related pages.

I’ll give em another 6 to 10 weeks (it took Google 2-3 months to start changing from Florida) and see if this algo still is in place. If it is, then I will be under the assumption that they find their serps to be good enough and thus be strong evidence that this algo is deliberate anti-seo.

[deanril]

Exactly - newwebster!

Do this:

Search for your main keywords the ones they charge a lot for, for the sponsered results.

Then - do a search for the smaller keywords that you rank for, the ones you know for sure they dont charge very much for.

In my area, I'm finding crap results (on purpose) in the High Dollar keywords, the low budget smaller ones I still rank perfect, unchanged.

If that is not enough evidense then I dont know what is.

YAHOO - you will only hurt yourself in the long run. The Spike in revenue you see now, will start a downhill slide and you will never recover. The ultimate goal of a search engine(besides revenue) is to provide relevant results for searched terms. If you loose this ability you loose your search engine(and Revenue!)........ Thats all I gots to say about that......