Yahoo algo change?

Big alterations over weekend.

[makemetop]

With the new SERPs which came out a couple of months ago - it seemed pretty easy to get a good shot at getting a decent first page listing by ensuring you got keywords in the 'big' 4 areas:

Tile, Description, URL and Category. This seemed pretty clear and universal on all searches I did - with some slight differences due to click through ratings. There seems to have been a big change to this over the weekend, especially on areas where there were many results and this simple method of determining relevancy seems to have changed somewhat!

Certainly if you now look at the competitive SEO area (among others) you will see that the top site no longer has the 'big' 4 criteria in place (although it did). This has also happened on several other areas which I have been monitoring. What do you think the change is? Is it click through analysis coming into play, link popularity, an algo change - or just my imagination?

[markd]

I've been getting some very unpredictable SERPS from Yahoo for about a week and wondered if this was some kind of glitch in the way they are delivering results.

Particularly as there are so many rumours about Yahoo incorporating results from new providers, dropping others etc.

I too have noticed that 'the big 4' are less prominent in the results, but I think I will see how the land lies over the next couple of weeks before I draw any hard and fast (no pun intended!) indicators for the future.

Interested to see what everyone else thinks.

[Marcia]

Could be irrelevant, but someone emailed me last week with their description, saying they had submitted their new site to Yahoo. I wrote back asking what title they submitted, and was told that there was no option for submitting a title. I do not know if this is correct, not having a way to verify it; but that's what I was told.

[Bubba]

I made a few submissions to Yahoo last week and it allowed me to submit a title. Regading the big 4, there has been a change with the way these are being looked at, but I cannot find any consistency.

Has anyone simulated click thru's and seen a difference?

[seth_wilde]

"was told that there was no option for submitting a title"

By Yahoo's rules your company name is your title... but that doesn't stop people from temporarily changing their company name :)

[2_much]

Yahoo seems to have updated their ranking algorithm. They seem to do this every month for competitive categories.
Depending on the competitiveness of the area, they give the different factors more or less points.

[skibum]

Some of the jumps in the SEO arena have been off the charts. Could be some click pop scripts at work?