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From past experience, I expected to have, in order of referring hits: Yahoo, AOL, Google (just the google.com, all google combined would beat Y and AOL).
I in fact noticed the increase in AOL traffic, but to my surprise, Yahoo hits remained insignificant. I checked several times the Y SERPs, and indeed I was close to the top.
Then, today I decided to click my own links. They look something like My Site [srd.yahoo.com] (I changed some numbers/letters so as to disguise my site; the "testg" string, however, is original from Yahoo).
Surprise: I could not reach my site "Cannot find server". I clicked again and again, and about 1/10th of times I managed to click through. My logs show that a few people reach my sites (but very far from the expected).
I repeated the same process to other searches, and I saw the same thing happening to other popular keywords.
Questions:
1) is anybody seeing the same?
2) any ideas about what's causing the problem, and when it's supposed to be fixed?
3) is there form from Yahoo I could use to report this?
Thanks,
[edited by: 2_much at 7:46 pm (utc) on Mar. 15, 2003]
[edit reason] fixed url for scrolling [/edit]
Just to add some other interesting points:
As I said, I had some other good rankings from previous months. When I click those links, I click through to the sites with no problems at all (and my logs confirm that the surfers haven't had troubles either).
The problem I reported seems to affect only the new listings. For some reason, Yahoo can't parse the long URL to redirect the surfer to my site.
I do hope they get this fixed soon.
I don't get too much traffic from Yahoo or AOL generally - Yahoo generally runs at about one-fifth of the Google total and AOL about one-third of Yahoo - largely I suspect because I run a specialist B2B site.
I have seen AOL refs increase by about 30%, but Y refs - which I would have thought would follow Google's pattern - have remained static, so I was very interested to see your post.
However I could not reproduce your problems with their redirect links, a few that I tried worked just fine.
I guess in my case that the new keywords for which I have optimised are not ones in particularly frequent use by Y! users. I can't spot any such pattern in the logs though...
best of luck sorting out your links
HenryUK,
I work in a competitive area, the keywords we are talking about are populars, the changes at the top are not uncommon.
As I said, only the keywords which appeared close to the top this last update seem have been affected. The other good rankings of mine which I already had saw an increase in traffic, too.
Food for thought, isnīt it?
