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One of my sites was, until recently, hosted in Florida, US. The site sells consumer electronics and has been targeting the US market.
The problem is that almost all the Y searches landing on my site have nothing to do with the USA visitors.
Somehow I got high (1-3) positions for very competitive search terms, but mostly on sg.search.yahoo.com and uk.search.yahoo.com, followed by hk.search.yahoo.com and some other "exotic" extensions.
I have also some ordinary search.yahoo.com results, but I have noticed the IP's belong to non-US countries, where Yahoo doesn't have devoted subdomain .
UK? Singapore?
Now the most interesting part: The providers of the hosting plan are of the Singapore origin, but no IP, nameservers or whois data can reveal that.
The whois of my domain shows my address in Netherlands, but searching from nl, my site is nowhere to find.
Well, two months ago it was almost the leader globally, but they probably made some major algo changes.
Could the above mentioned Singapore puzzle be purely accidental or is there some explanation for this?
I was thinking about slow datacenters algo changes, but on the other side I don't think the Y .uk would be among the last to implement them.
Any opinions?
I also noticed that mx updating the cache much faster than main yahoo search...
I was using this one:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252".
Although it is not supposed to cause problems, I have changed it into "us-ascii", to be even more specific than using ISO-8859-1.
I guess I'll have to wait at least two weeks to see if it makes any difference.
[edited by: Freemind at 7:32 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2005]
I can't explain this, except a wild guess that they consider everyone who's whois shows European origin, with an English language site, belonging to the UK.
Even so, this doeas not explain Asian results.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><head>
<title>XXX</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<META http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Before the last update I was 5th! and now I´m 50th but only in USA search. Any ideas?
As I am on VPS, I have checked my apache (2.0.51) set-up and one of the default settings, which probably noone changes, looks interesting.
As I was very suspicious towards the charactersets, I was looking in that direction.
So, after usual definitions of supported ISO character sets, here it comes :
****************************************************
# The set below does not map to a specific (iso) standard
# but works on a fairly wide range of browsers. Note that
# capitalization actually matters (it should not, but it
# does for some browsers).
#
AddCharset GB2312 .gb2312 .gb
AddCharset utf-7 .utf7
AddCharset utf-8 .utf8
AddCharset big5 .big5 .b5
AddCharset EUC-TW .euc-tw
AddCharset EUC-JP .euc-jp
AddCharset EUC-KR .euc-kr
AddCharset shift_jis .sjis
*******************************************************
So, those are not standard ISO sets. Could it be that confused algo accepts them as default character sets?
Anyway, I have commented them out and started waiting.
P.S. Just saw Marcia's comment.
Someone in another thread commented that the US algo change comes as the last and is not yet fully implemented. I would be happy if that was true.
The location of the nameservers?
Yahoo, please grow up.
Country: United States
Region: New York
City: Jericho
Last time I used this form I got hand written reply withing 48 hours.
The location of the nameservers?
I changed hosting providers back last May. My former hosting provider is located in Canada. My current one is in California USA. Yahoo still thinks I am in Canada since if I do a "search for sites in Canada" I have top listings just like it was before May. Needles to say my rankings for the US search are horrible. I think once the your site is picked up for the first time by Yahoo it finds the nameservers and pins you to that location. I also think that Yahoo does not update the nameservers location ever after it finds it the first time. Good luck but I do not think anything you do at this point will make any difference.
Yahoo has it wrong in many ways in my nich. Geo targeting is just one of them.
I just looked at the Mexico search. I rank well there to. Go figure!
newwebster, did you tried to contant yahoo regarding us rankinks?
Just did, I will let you know if I hear anything.
I have succeeded to bring at least the home page into the US domain space.
It is listed both as UK & an US page. No other US pages yet.
The consequence:
I have lost almost all of my UK traffic which made about 60% of the Yahoo searches, while not gaining anything from the USA searches!
LOL
My only hope is that this is a transitional period only and that the slow Y will make it in the end, though.
