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I don't know what's going to happen as Y adds more paid results but for now their results are excellent.
The observation isn't based on my sites, half of my sites aren't even in Yahoo but are in Google. This is based on comparing the two against equal searches.
How quickly the sand shifts...
-s-
Re current relevancy of Google, if you are targeting a 4 or 5 word phrase which does not appear on any other website having done a "KW" search, should the only site on the web that does contain that KW, be in the top Google SERPs?
I would suggest yes as I believe most users would - It always used to which is why IMO Google got so big. Average users typing in very precise KWs want results returned which contain these KWs. Thats not what Google is giving right now.
They're trying to guess what people want with a combination of Semantics & Hilltop and its just not working. Good in theory, really bad in practice.
We've a decent 200 page site that was consistently top 5 on G for over 2 years on a great KW with 9 million results. Its now in the 20's for the last 2 weeks. A far worse site we also run with bought PR links is now top 3 on another very competitive KW. (Pharma sector)
If Google was really improving, the previously top 5 site would still be first page and the now #3 site would be nowhere.
The semantic thing may be great for getting mispellings etc.
The Hilltop thing may also be great I think for competitive 1 & 2 word phrases in that it removes lots of spam. At a much lower level, they should have left things as they were as this is where the relevancy is being most effected and is most obvious.
Yahoo on the other hand seems to be giving ok results for the smaller KWs where G has screwed up.
But I must say that in Yahoo searching for my top local keywords, that yahoo are more relevant, though donīt include autority international sites that only have these words ones in text.
Thats up for Yahoo,
Down for yahoo, first I should be there.......
second there are more spam results in yahoo than in google as hidden text, etc
There are two domains:
bluewidgets.tld
blue-widgets.tld
The first one (bluewidgets.tld) , is listed in Yahoo directory for many years (since 1998 if memory serves), it has been crawled by Slurp, it's in DMOZ since 1998, it has been around since 1995 (under different URI which has a 301 perm-redir to the new address since 2001), has hundreds of incoming links and many of the links to it date as back as 1996.
The second one (blue-widgets.tld with the "-" huphen) is "ServerAlias" of the main site, ie with the hyphen (which has a 301 redirect to the main site) This URL was never meant to be public (just registered to prevent potential abuse) and has just 4 incoming links from "whitepages" sites which list every single country domain starting from that letter. Yet it appears in the top40 of Yahoo SERPs.
So of the 2 domains, both with the SAME content, the aliased one (ie <http://www.blue-widgets.tld/>) with ZERO legitimate links gets into SERPs top40, whereas the "original" site with TONS of links is nowhere to be
found.
And btw, not only is there a 301 redirect to the "real" domain, the homepage even has metatags informing SE about "true URL" for 1.5yr now ie
<meta name="URL" content="http://www.bluewidgets.tld/">
<meta name="identifier-url" content="http://www.bluewidgets.tld/">
And finally, IF the site is actually penalised, what could possibly be the reason? The site never used ANY "questionable" practices.
Regards, Dimitris
