The Switch Is Official

[Brett_Tabke]

According to some reports [news.com.com] yahoo is now ack'ing [webmasterworld.com] that the change to their "internally powered results" is offical. eg: goodbye Google.

[goin2travel]

So far this switch sucks.

My main site has completely dissappeared from Yahoo's new search results. This is despite investing in Inktomi advertising as well as a Yahoo! sponsored listing.

The site comes up top 5 regularly on G and other SE for keywords related to it - and I have been conservative in optimizing it.

In contrast, some older sites, that I barely touch anymore, nor pay Yahoo for sponsored listings, are showing up high on Yahoo!

This makes little sense. A quality site, is removed and old, junky sites are now showing up high. Seems like if a customer pays to advertise, plus the site has been reviewed by a Yahoo human, it wouldnt be completely removed from the search results.

I almost cancelled 2 sponsored listings on Yahoo tonight, that are $600 a month, though decided to wait and see if anything changes.

Also invested a bunch in Inktomi advertising and that hasn't done anything to insure that the site remained in the new search results.

[mayor]

The serp database looks pretty stale to me. Older sites from a year ago are represented well. Newer sites and pages from the past several months don't seem to be in the SERPs.

This smells like the Inktomi serp database to me :(

[nvision]

Just to contrast what some are saying about "old" results on the "new" Y! - unless this is an isolated case, I'm seeing changes to pages that were made within the last two weeks reflected on current searches.

[mayor]

nvision, you're seeing recent changes to existing pages but are you seeing new pages?

[Visit Thailand]

I am a little confused. I agree that the SERPS look different etc but why is it that there is no cache next to my pages?

The only no cache we have is for Google.

I am pleased that yahoo / ink is not caching the pages but why is it respecting the G no cache tag?

[Gavstar]

I agree the results dont show up to date quality sites.

I have 10 sites that aren't much good some rightfully banned in Google that are dominating Yahoo results. Whilst my 14 month old and newer site that ranks very well in Google and contains excellent content is no where to be seen.

10 crapy sites right at the top is better than 1 top quality site at the top for me but not best for Yahoo.

[zeus]

Ohh man this will ruin Yahoo, I realy tried to give it a change I had a few things, from travel, products free services, sports and more I had to search for, I used Yahoo as Im used to, I did not find one single thing that I was looking for, then I tried Google and found everything.

It looks like I would only use Yahoo for stocks, email and news. Normal search is then made on Google

zeus

[ByronM]

Yeah, these serps are dissapointing. Searching for "information on widget" or "widget reviews" and stuff is bringing back some OLD websites that just redirect me elsewhere.

tons of fluff domains that have keywords stacked up but no content..

i hope Yahink and Google can work on some major blacklists to block these link farms and pfi directories that are killing searches.

[balam]

Visit Thailand,

> I am pleased that yahoo / ink is not caching the pages but why is it respecting the G no cache tag?

Why, I don't know - but I like it.

See: [help.yahoo.com...]

[patoruzu]

>>>Ohh man this will ruin Yahoo<<<

What is the Google’s core business? Search. What is the Yahoo’s core business? Net advertising? E-mail? Search? It’s not clear and this is dangerous, because in a high competitive enviroment you have to concentrate on your main strength. Google, for example, has now a solid presence in the most important newspapers of the world. Why they would change to Yahink? Does Yahoo want a search engine just for its portals? Is this sustanaible? This has been a risky move.

[johannamck]

I'm watching "cityname, state" searches of several smaller cities (< 50,000) and the results are great compared to Google. So many spammy hotel reservation and niche directory sites opened only recently, during the last few months. Google is aching under the load. On the new Yahoo, those sites are nowhere to be seen.

Traffic has gone up tremendously for my older sites (August 2003 and earlier).

On the negative side: Traffic has plummeted for my newer sites.

Yahoo/Ink has to get a bit fresher to be complete. Hopefully they will be able to include newer sites while sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Related thought:

I wish they would offer an affordable Pay for Inclusion option. $39/year for a 50-page website, with maybe just a biweekly or monthly refresh. I know the demand would be huge!

A lot of people frown on PFI but I think it would be a good way to let in sites with quality content while shutting out the 100K-page operations that throw an enormous amount of pages at search engines, hoping that part of it will "stick."

[Visit Thailand]

Thanks balam but that link is for the robots exclusion tag whereas our pages only have the googlebot no cache tag.

That is why I find it strange that Yahoo SERPS do not show any cache for our pages.

[NuffRespect]

I am really getting tired of webmasters that judge the quality of the SERP's (Yahoo/Google) by how well their website is performing. I read countless posts from webmasters about how their new sites are not listed or doing well in the SERP's, but their 18 months crappy spammy website in the order hand is doing well.

When looking at the quality of SERP'S, please be Objective and NOT Subjective.

[goin2travel]

Nuff,

One isn't being subjective when you have numerous sites and some are old and not that good and they show up high in a search; whereas current sites, with fresh content dont show up at all.

In one respect though all opinions regarding whether the Y results are good / bad are subjective.

One great thing about the Y results is they pick up dynamic pages much better than G.

[ByronM]

Competition is good, no denying that, but these serps are old... nothing new in there. Some sites have newer titles and tags for the main url, but no real new sites since August of last year for almost everything i'm searching for.

That is a slow crawl of this index is for competition!

[worker]

I'm less concerned with the age of the results, and more concerned that the results don't seem to reflect the best sites for specific searches. Relevance is there, because if you search for blue widgets, you get blue widget results. The problem I'm finding is that the sites at the top of the listings are simplistic and lacking in any type of obvious authority on subjects. It looks more like they got the design right, so they show up high, while much much better sites, with more content and information, appear lower in the results.
I'm not complaining though. I have seen an overall increase in traffic since the change, much to my surprise. It appears to be coming from some of my sites that I really don't think are very good, yet Yahink seems to love. Go figure.

[Easy_Coder]

Since the switch my Yahoo referrals are now edging out my Google referrerals. I haven't seen that in 3 years on my site.

[tigger]

I'm still waiting for it to move over to the UK, anyone got any ideas when?

[MWeissman]

regarding nvision's comment, it looks like Yahoo took 70% of its results from the Inktomi database. The latter is not known to be a very fresh database ( [revue-referencement.com...] )

[percentages]

IMHO the new Yahoo search rocks! Okay, I am biased, but even for sites/cats where I have no financial interest the results are as good and 90%+ of the time better than those on Google.

Yahoo, you did the right thing......and people generally will love you for it!

Google needs to be shown which way is up, and now Yahoo and MSN are starting to do that :)

[mayor]

MWeissman, that's a really interesting article. The signatures of Inktomi, Alta Vista, and AllTheWeb indicate their serps quit being updated in October, November and January, respectively.

The Yahoo signature suggests a stong correlation with Inktomi, but with, as you say, around 30% coming in from another source. Could that other source be Yahoo's own directory?

Running a graphical integration on the Google and the Yahoo signatures reveals an interesting story about the comparative freshness of those indexes.

[RammsteinNicCage]

If I do a search for my main keyword for one of my sites, I've been getting two different results at different times. The weird part is that one of the results uses my old angelfire address that has a meta redirect to my "new" 2-3 year old domain but with a recent cache. The other results shows my newer domain but with a slightly older cache (between 2-4 weeks older).

Jennifer

[mikeD]

the results look terrible from where i am standing, Google's are much better for relevancy. Just filled with spam in the UK.

[george123]

Yahoo.co.uk results are last Tuesday's G results Yahoo.us today results are not yet updated check [search.yahoo.com...]
and check
[google.co.uk...]
see the difference in number of results ,nearly 2.000.000 are missing from Yahoo index versus G index,i dont believe it will be any change its just another usual update of Yahoo,as for the ones they have seen in there logs lots of traffic from Yahoo ,that's because there pages can't be found on Google ,finally simble as that ,Google is the king.

[george123]

I just noticed that right now 21.38 GMT even the Yahoo us results have change to last Tuesday's Google results

[gweston]

My Yahoo referrers are about 10-12% of what they were before the conversion...yet I don't notice a huge difference in the SERPS for my keywords. It looks like all of my articles as of January 23/04 are in the index.

I suspect the majority of Yahoo users are switching over to Google.

I know I did.

[seasalt]

In the new Yahoo, I can't even find the name of my company in the results.

For example, if I type in my company name "Web Widgets" under the Advanced Search function "Show results with the exact phrase", I don't see my site in the first 500 hundred results. Furthermore, the results shown do not have those words as an exact phrase - only as separate individual words on the page.

I get crawled by Inktomi. On every other SE out there I can find my company by name. It's been out there for over 3 1/2 years.

?

seasalt

[mikeD]

Sites with keywords in their main url are ranking well. Mainly 1st by the looks. But a lot of these are just spam. Seems to be light years away from the quality of Google's serps.

The quality of commercial results seems extremely poor. Can't see kelkoo etc which I suppose maybe a blessing, but whats replaced them on yahoo is ten times worse. Just absolute spammy rubbish.

Noticed the Yahoo Shopping page is ranking unusually high for a lot of shopping terms. Surprise Surprise.

[goin2travel]

Y shopping is being shoved at people doing searches.

They are driving traffic away from other companies search results towards Y shopping.

[Becky]

This may have already been discussed somewhere in this thread, but how do I go about getting listed in yahoo?

I had excellent rankings in yahoo when they were carrying the google index, but now that they have dropped google, my site cannot be found at yahoo and my yahoo traffic has ceased.

Do I need to pay the 39 dollar inclusion fee at Inktomi or what?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.