Sudden drop in Yahoo referrals on May 26th

[JohnKelly]

Normally I get around 2000+ search referrals from Yahoo per day. But something apparently happened sometime on May 26th, as on that day I only received a little over 800 requests from Yahoo.

I cannot see any matching decrease on other search engine referrals, so thatough I would ask here. Using the site:domain.com it appears that most of the pages are still indexed, so I'm not sure what happened...

Anyone know of anything going on at Yahoo that could cause such a thing?

[bppilot]

We are in the EXACT same boat.... top of the listing for our main industry phrase, 2000+ per day... the next day we dropped to only 9 referals for the ENTIRE day - makes you're 800 referals actually look GOOD :)

In our case, we offer the largest selection and lowest prices in our entire industry (we check our competitors daily). Most of them have 4,000-5,000 products online... we have 25,000. This is really discouraging, because when someone searches for a product in our industry, the chances are they would find it at a low price with us, but instead are getting all kinds of 'junk' results now that we've been dropped. (All of our pages are also still indexed with them when I check individual ones).

I know that Yahoo depends on good search results, or users will not use them, and they will not suceed as a search engine. I can't for the life of me figure out why then Yahoo has made such a drastic change. Could it be for the 'leaders' to then be forced into paid listings to enhance revenue? If they don't produce good natural search results, then they won't have any long term revenue regardless.

I think Yahoo is a great organization and is a great search engine. I'm just really disappointed with this turn of events in their algorithm that I think is off base. With any kind of luck, they will realize this quickly and correct it.

Just my two cents!

[JohnKelly]

Bppilot, what day did you see the sudden drop in referrals from Yahoo?

[bppilot]

It looks like it happened on 5/25 (Tuesday). The referal traffic from Yahoo dropped off dramatically on all 175 of my sites. It was like someone just pulled the plug.

[jim_w]

How many pages deep did you go and look for them. I found my page listed w/o the www 15 pages deep. When I define the search better I’m on top like I was for years.
See this…
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
msg #:15

What I did was entered the KW’s and went from page to page using the IE find function and looked for my domain name on the SERP. It’s not so painful to do as you may think. Just see if you are list w/o the www in your domain name somewhere very deep.

[soapystar]

Could it be for the 'leaders' to then be forced into paid listings to enhance revenue?

the link between serps and Yahoo's own links can easily be seen from a search for one of the large travel sites, this normally brings up a Yahoo travel link coded as travel_competitor. Other travel searches will bring up a different yahoo search facility.

I'm not saying the original poster was right but that there is a clear link between serps and how Yahoo handles the return for a given query.

[Good_Vibes]

I also had many of my client's sites drop right out of the top 100. Many even went from #1 to #300+.

Anyone have any ideas as to the cause of this syndrome?

[Allie_Mae]

My site too has lost the majority of it's Yahoo traffic since late last month.

Just out of curiousity, how many of you are running adsense?

[Callanish]

I had two sites hit like this at the time mentioned: one had Adsense on every page, one had Adsense on about one third of the pages.

My sites are not dropped, just degraded in the results, so it looks like an algorithm change.

[minnapple]

I run a test site were I change certain variables.
Pre-AdSense it had decent Yahoo traffic.
After I added AdSense the Yahoo traffic ended within two weeks.
I removed AdSense the Yahoo traffic reappeared within two weeks.
The only other change during the period was the amount of inbound links.

[jim_w]

I’m running adsense, but, I still feel the reason I disappeared from the results is because my site is in the index with a www and w/o the www.

If the ads do have an effect on the placement in their SERPs for a page, I have news for (Y), there are too many people that are making more money from adsense ads than from visitors from (Y) for them to pull their adsense ads. If that is indeed the case, then (Y) is pulling what I call an ‘altavista’. For those who weren’t around back then, several years ago when altavista was the #1 search engine, they would remove your pages from their index if you complained about the SERPs. Like if you reported a spammer. That was the beginning of the end for them.

[TrustNo1]

"Using the site:domain.com it appears that most of the pages are still indexed, so I'm not sure what happened... "

Still indexed but still ranking in the same spots? Probably just a shift, i'm sure others on the same day actually saw an increase in Yahoo traffic.

[Asifm]

We are running with the exact same problem. Using the site domain name search i can see that the pages are still in yahoo index but since Feb 2004 yahoo traffic has been dropped about 90%.