Yahoo Update?

Sep. 21, 2005

[sugarrae]

Been seeing various changes across a lot of serps.

[webhound]

yeah we run a huge site and are an actual manufacturer yet for reasons unknown and unexplained we've been banned by yahoo for months. Looking at the serps makes me wanna hurl. How they can ban quality sites with tons of unique content, while listing the keyword spam domains and subdomains is completely beyond me.

Yahoo, if your reading this, fix your broken search engine already - we are all sick of it.

[mikey158]

I agree with sugarrae ... this business is about staying ahead - not behind!

Lets take a crack at how to work within whatever current algo is in place - or may be coming.

web been bedy bedy good to me

[sugarrae]

Anyone else seeing what resembles A/B testing of algos/indexes? Been seeing two distinct sets of results for about a week now - it is either results A or results B - no shifting - A or B - but I see them at different times of the day. Lately when I go, I get either index A or B, but sometimes I get A, A, A, B, and sometimes B, A, B, B - you get the picture.

[jam2005]

>>>Anyone else seeing what resembles A/B testing of algos/indexes?

This is exactly what I have been thinking. At different times of the day I get different search results and it either one or the other.

[Matt Ermatix]

A year ago we used to be very high on Yahoo, and nowhere on Google. We redirected all our non-www traffic to www and shot to the top of Google (position 1 to 3) for most of our keywords. We assumed this was because Google was seeing duplicate content, prior to our 301 redirect.

Unfortunately Yahoo didn't like the 301 redirect and sent us to PAGE 20+ for the past year. After reading this post and checking our logs we now seem to be back at the top of Yahoo (and Google), so hopefully amongst other things Yahoo are cleaning up the 301 issue.

Interestingly site:domain.com and site:www.domain.com show mainly www.domain.com pages now (so it looks like merging our backlinks from domain.com and www.domain.com), whereas previously (a month or so ago) they would show two different lists.

So if you used to be top ranked on Yahoo, you may be facing new competition from other popular sites that were confusing Yahoo with 301 redirects.

[RichTC]

ive noticed that recently slurp bot has been more active on a number of sites. Its like its adding more pages to its index but they are not converting to positions in the SERPS.

At one point last year i though that it was a case that the yahoo index was full and that you had to wait for site pages to drop out the index before new ones were added?.

Im not sure what the position is currently. Either they are just gathering pages for the next update or they want to show a massive number of pages in the index but only list the first so many in the serps.

I notice they are updating backlinks currently

[fourchette]

hi all,

I have experienced something weird with this recent yahoo update. First of all, all the keywords I was ranking for in the last couple of years fell down at the beginning of the update and disappeared completely, expect one page, that stayed exactly on spot. On the first page of a pretty competitive keyword. What is weird is that this only page that stayed in the SERPS is also the only one to have a cache in the yahoo system. All my other pages have dropped their cache from yahoo...So my guess is ( and I really hope so) that yahoo will come back and male a fresh crawl of my site, and them re-rank all those pages that are not ranking anymore. Isin't a weird way of doing a site's update, or maybe they has a little trouble in the last crawling/indexing process?

Do you think this could be a penalty? It would be a weird penalty to remove all cache from all pages except one!

fourchette

[wolfgang]

I've looked at the first page of serps for one of our main keywords and 3 of the top 5 are Amazon book links and the other is a Wikipedia link. Wikipedia just showed up the other day, the Amazon links have been there for a month or so. If this is what Yahoo deems relevant search results, then why not just do a redirect to Google and get it over with. If this is what having a bigger index means, I say let the size wars be over.

[edited by: jatar_k at 1:56 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2005]

[imstillatwork]

well logicaly, if all you guys are loossing your places, others are gaining. I am showing up on yahoo where I had been stale - dormant -for years.

[tictoc]

imstillatwork -

please tell us what you did to your site to get back in good with yahoo... It has been the impossible for me.

[wolfgang]

I never said I was losing substantial placement. I've dropped a couple 4 places, still on page 1. But if the lisings that have risen to the top, Amazon and Wikipedia, are an indication of the new algo, then there's something wrong with it. Believe me, those are not results that someone is looking for when they do this particular KW search.

[imstillatwork]

tictoc -

Thats it, I didn't do anything but my regular content updates.

Possibly the way Yahoo is sorting and calculating now naturaly placed mine higher then ever, while things that worked before with others are simply not fitting the algos anymore.
I have no idea, and anything else anyone here says is speculation too.

I was just supprised to see so many more yahoo referals than usuall

[imstillatwork]

who knows...search engines will never settle, there will never be a way to find only the accurate, relevant results. I think the trend is going towards giving large, bloated sites more importance, regardless of the real applicable relevance..

[dethfire]

a couple of my sites completely droped from yahoo too

[stargeek]

"I think the trend is going towards giving large, bloated sites more importance, regardless of the real applicable relevance."

that may be the result of algo trends, but it is not the intent, and it is more important to discern the intent behind "trends" in algos.

[BillyS]

I've given up trying to figure out why my site was dropped from Yahoo! There's nothing wrong with the site at all.

My guess is that someday they will figure out why they've excluded some websites and let us back in. Until then, I just keep adding content.

[indiangal]

Friends I don’t know what’s going on with yahoo search .Earlier my hits from yahoo was 700 now it has been dropped to 59 you will surprise 59 visits come from my domain name .e.g. mydomain.com and there cache results are very old. I have 3000 backlinks at yahoo. But these days they are worthless. I hope yahoo will read this because this is the best platform for all webmaster as well as for all companies who gets direct feedback from all webmasters. (Completely free of cost)