Forum Moderators: open
Enough negativity! :>~ Until Yahoo's next update.
About.com
Wikipedia.org
Ehow.com
About.com
Wikipedia.org
Epinions.com
About.com
etc.
We're still in the middle of the flux going by Tim's comments so I'm sure there are changes to come.
Anyways, Yahoo! does hold enough traffic to worry about, for US sites at least. Yahoo gives me about the same amount of traffic as Google.
I wouldn't exactly call the Yahoo! results poor, just different. Just because Google ranks a certain site #1 and it isn't in the first two or three pages in Yahoo doesn't mean it's a great site. It just means the Algs are different and the engines hone themselves for different types of searchers.
I have to say that over the past year I have been searching more and more on Yahoo to find what I need. (I always try Google first, but it fails maybe 1/3 of the time).
To those saying there aren't 'authoritative sites', then how come Wiki and About are always in the top 10? That is authoritative. They are great sites with great information, so why shouldn't they be in the top 10? Because of webmasters? Please. Search engines are made for searchers, not for webmasters.
As usual, virtually zero niche authority in the results.
And once again Google stock set to go up because their competitors fumble the ball.
The results he sees on several keywords are totally different from what I see and are far more spammy. Hopefully the ones I see are the true results because everything seems good.
I see this too with Yahoo. I mentioned an unscientific test based on my second grader's homework in another thread, where Ask.com won based on a natural language query.
It's funny (maybe not), but Google and Yahoo tried to send me to Wikipedia, but the result was way off based (had to do with the largest lake in the US - and yes, I knew the answer before I did the search).
Iv'e seen some not-to-white-hat stuff with About.com. Could be they just don't use a spell checker over there, because they seem to have some pretty common typos in some of their articles.
To those saying there aren't 'authoritative sites', then how come Wiki and About are always in the top 10? That is authoritative. They are great sites with great information, so why shouldn't they be in the top 10? Because of webmasters? Please. Search engines are made for searchers, not for webmasters.
I get the impression some people think any site without a shopping cart should not be in the serps.
Jay
In my niche I may be seeing a drop in the rankings of sites with adsense on them (not necessarily MFAs).
I've been knocked out of top on three keywords for three different sites, all by MFA splogs. 2 are in house for lead gen, one is AS driven.
What is a MFA splog?
Made For Adsense Spam Blog ;oP
Ska
Get a static domain name for your dynamic IP address – dynamic dns.
That's something 180 degrees from my niche. I mean it isn't even close.
Two listings in a row for it. I don't have any idea how that could possibly come up as a relevant result.
It's pretty obvious that something needs to be tweaked.
Some of the sites we work on rank and some dont but overall i think this is a good update.
Its possible the directory has something to do with it? im not sure, perhaps because at some point the Yahoo editor knows a site is not spam and relevent to the search term if its in the Yahoo directory, hence it ranks better?
What ever they have done it has eliminated loads of spam sites and you dont see any trace of doorways or cloaking issues that we had in the past.
All in all, this is a major step forward
Isn't this the single most important thing one should be looking at when analyzing serps in any engine? Goes to quality.
I am also STILL seeing complete spam sub domains ranking very well. Yahoo can't seem to get rid of even elementary spam.
[edited by: marketingmagic at 4:51 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2005]
At least these updates show that Yahoo are attempting to improve their core search product.
Serve up junk and computer users will know it, and leave and never come back. They have been serving up garbage for 6 months and this is the result, millions of dollars in market share Gone!
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:01 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed URL. [/edit]
I can't belive anyone could call the results good now, unless of course they are at the top. I search for the term <SNIP> and get this :
<SNIP>
Has nothing to do with my search term. I'm finding this all over. What is this crap!
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2005]
[edit reason] Please, no specifics. [/edit]
I am also STILL seeing complete spam sub domains ranking very well. Yahoo can't seem to get rid of even elementary spam.Which is exactly what the about.com subdomains represent in my niche. One about.com page is sufficient, although they still don't really have anything for my location. They keep returning several about.com pages on the front page that are from the large cities near my location. There is plenty of local talent.
About.com is the 'US News and World Report' of the web.
I'm 12th for my main keyword and there are two listings above me that are for for Dynamic DNS
I've noticed this same listing for a number of keywords I typed in out of the blue. Keep trying, keep finding. Nice.
Update - after a very slight bit of digging, my theory is that the updated algorithm is susceptible to the same (or a similar) redirect issue that was giving G problems a while back...
Site ranking well in top 10 for a very competetive one word phrase is a domain with nothing on it except 'this domain is for sale'.
Site has thousands of guest book links to it.
Go Yahoo!
I was testing implementing Google adwords on my site on one page, and had it up for a day. This was two days ago, at which point I had appx 990 pages indexed in Yahoo. Two days ago, the number of pages indexes drops to 86!
Anyone have any similar problems with the recent update? Do you think the dropped pages had anything to do with adwords?
