Forum Moderators: open
Search needs these people to step it up and get some parity going here. It’s time to let someone else try and pull the sword from the rock.
91 out of the first 100 results for a particular keyword, that I watch on regular basis, are all junk blogs, subdomain redirects and junk forum pages. All old records set during previous Yahoo "updates" have been broken. How can the folks working for Yahoo even call it an update?
I know it's insane to quote just one example but I'm going to anyway. My review page of a band is the #1 page for that band's name while the official site is #2. My on-page optimisation is probably much better than the band's and it is currently in my sidebar (so it has 400 internal links referencing the band's name). But there will be at most 4 external links to my review page (form the band and from CDBaby) while the band site will have many external links pointing to it. It suggests that a few dials need to be adjusted.
I posted this earlier:
[ Brilliant for me! I was 6th for my most important keyword a year ago...slowly dropped to 48th....now i'm 8th. Which is where i am in Google. 4 year old solid site that deserves to be there...they got it right, for me at least ]
Have now returned to 49th?
My site isn't new, it's solid. Are results still jumping around?
Why would my site so drastically change back and forth rankings?
Ideas? Many thanks in advance!
You would think that the Yahoo! USA would be the best. Seems like they are tweaking it bad purposely. Let's see what happens in the next day or so.
Search queries that make you reach for a crash helmet
Did a search on a common two word seo term and they have the United Nations, two links to Java.Sun downloads page, a Virtual Library page about Sustainable Development, a site about Open Source Software, and a link to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Two of the positions are WebmasterWorld, and the other two belong to a pair of keyword in domain sites (one of which is an Egyptian IT company that has nothing to do with the query, and the other is a business software company that also is irrelevant to the query).
So that's 8 misses out of 10, with only the two WebmasterWorld results being relevant.
Inconsistent Performance
Is there some kind of authority knob cranked to 11 here? Even MSN gets it right. This shouldn't be happening. It's the inconsistency of the results that bothers me the most.
Also with absolutely no correspondence from the Yahoo search team it shows how much they care as well. Their search blog asks for a few examples and then their team does not even elaborate as to why their results do not produce.
As far as I'm concerned Yahoo is now behind WiseNut.
Currently, when I do that search in Google, the top ten results are all sites or pages that have information on cheetahs.
The results in Yahoo however are apalling. The top nine spots are forum posts with the number 1 spot being Yahoo Answers.
Only one page actually had any information about cheetahs, compared to Google, where 9 pages had information on cheetahs. None of the Yahoo results made the connection to Acinonyx Jubatus, all the others did.
In Yahoo Australia, none of the pages had information on cheetahs, they were all forum posts. The tenth spot was a 'Treasure Hunt' form being used by a school that had, word for word, the search question. Not a single page in the top 10 was a page or site about cheetahs.
Two years ago, the same test on both search engines was the reverse. Yahoo used to have excellent results, the Google results would mostly be affiliate sites with links to purchase books on cheetahs.
My test currently produced a score of 1/10 for yahoo.com. For the first time in 10 years of using this test, a zero score, 0/10 for yahoo.com.au. Google gets 9/10. Only one scraper site made it into the top ten. Ask.com scores 5/10. A biography of Abraham Lincoln ended up in the top 10 with them. They must be using an interesting algorithm. MSN.com scores a perfect 10/10. Every result was a site or page about cheetahs.
Doing a search for Blue Widgets and having your site at number 1 doesn't make these current Yahoo results good.
I'm talking the first relevant result is #27.
The results in Yahoo however are apalling.
And what do you suspect is causing this aberration?
There is a logical reason for it to fail. For instance, in my seo related term (and it's not SEO) the reason I suspect it's failing is obviously because there are links causing those sites to rank for the term, although only maybe one word of the two word phrase actually appears on the government type sites.
So please, it's nice for people to give feedback on crappy results, but it's really important for the community to reflect on WHY those results may be bad, to take a guess at WHAT FACTORS are causing those results to warp into bad results.
To my way of thinking, an analogy to gravity can be made. If a celestial body is producing enough gravitational pull, it can make another body change it's orbit. Similarly, algorithmic peculiarities can cause bad results to arise. It's like the gravity of whitelisting, link analysis, etc. is causing some sites to rank higher. So you have to set about to figure out what factors account for those bad result sets.
MSNDude said something similar in the MSN update thread regarding their algo. That if they tweak one aspect to get a serp right, it may cause other serps to go haywire. So what aspect is causing your example serps to go wrong?
Less anchors please!
So, it seems as if those sites have so much juice that a bunch of anchors is enough to make them rank for completely irrelevant terms. What this means to me is that Yahoo may not be accurately analyzing the topic of the site and page, not enough to know that the anchor data is not appropriate to the site and should be discarded or devalued: i.e. they aren't deprecating irrelevant links. In other words, not enough on page analysis, too much anchor weighting and not enough anchor analysis.
This is just my guess. What is yours?
What I also see is four or five page sites with only one or two inbound links ranking higher than our site. We are buried in the 50s+.
Also see parked domains ranking well.
I can now sadly say that Yahoo's results are now worse than google's. If you want to find anything now, you need to go to msn.com or ask.com
what's going on here?
And what do you suspect is causing this aberration?
There is a logical reason for it to fail. For instance, in my seo related term (and it's not SEO) the reason I suspect it's failing is obviously because there are links causing those sites to rank for the term, although only maybe one word of the two word phrase actually appears on the government type sites.So please, it's nice for people to give feedback on crappy results, but it's really important for the community to reflect on WHY those results may be bad, to take a guess at WHAT FACTORS are causing those results to warp into bad results.
To my way of thinking, an analogy to gravity can be made. If a celestial body is producing enough gravitational pull, it can make another body change it's orbit. Similarly, algorithmic peculiarities can cause bad results to arise. It's like the gravity of whitelisting, link analysis, etc. is causing some sites to rank higher. So you have to set about to figure out what factors account for those bad result sets.
MSNDude said something similar in the MSN update thread regarding their algo. That if they tweak one aspect to get a serp right, it may cause other serps to go haywire. So what aspect is causing your example serps to go wrong?
Less anchors please!
So, it seems as if those sites have so much juice that a bunch of anchors is enough to make them rank for completely irrelevant terms. What this means to me is that Yahoo may not be accurately analyzing the topic of the site and page, not enough to know that the anchor data is not appropriate to the site and should be discarded or devalued: i.e. they aren't deprecating irrelevant links. In other words, not enough on page analysis, too much anchor weighting and not enough anchor analysis.This is just my guess. What is yours?
Honesly martinibuster I think that inbound anchor text is hurting site rankings unless of course you have ungodly amounts of inbound links from on-topic relevant sites and I'm talking 1000's of inbounds not just hundreds. It amazes me that some of the sites in the top 10 have minimal to non-existent inbound links and are dominating the SERP's. I have one particular site that is on overtures keyword tracker tool as a keyword phrase related to the two phrase keyword and it's buried in the 150's+.
Keyword Density seems to me to be affecting the SERP's as well. In the sector I watch all top 10 sites have a keyword density between .50% and 1.2% and the sites that were dominating the top 10 for over 3+ years that had KD in the 3-5% range are nowhere to be found now. It's like Yahoo is penalizing sites for higher keyword densities and inbound link anchor text. Another thing that seems to be hurting sites is keyword in url strings that use this method for better rankings for Google's ALLINURL. If your exploiting keywords in the url string Yahoo seems to be penalizing it after so many URL thresholds(if that makes sense).
Another thing I notice is that when you do a search and the results are returned it seems that your keyword phrase is not plastered all over the SERP's. It's only annotated like once in each SERP. Repeating your keyword phrase in the body and increasing your KD kills as I see it.
Honestly though I cannot figure out this algorithm and I don't think I even care to as these results are going to push searchers out to other engines if they can't find what they are looking for.
Of course, YSM advertisers are loving it. Funny thing I decided to try a little advertising again with YSM and my position at #6-#7 is returning the traffic I was getting at #1 in the natural SERP's before this silly update. That tells me purely that searchers in my niche cannot find what they are looking for!
Earlier I mentioned that Yahoo just doesn't seem to care what we think but I haven't been following Yahoo much and didn't realize that Site Explorer is Yahoo's new way of communicating with webmasters. Anybody have any experience with this and is Yahoo actually communicating or are they just trying to mimic Google while not providing the real communication they say the program is for?
I would be interested in hearing how the site explorer and webmaster/yahoo search team communication is working.
Spot on!
What I also see is four or five page sites with only one or two inbound links ranking higher than our site. We are buried in the 50s+.Also see parked domains ranking well.
Now that would be a new SEO technique...Parked domains for Yahoo! Click here for the site that Yahoo doesn't want you to see! :>~
Oh well, best of luck with Yahoo to all.
[edited by: MLHmptn at 10:37 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]
that inbound anchor text is hurting site rankings unless of course you have ungodly amounts of inbound links from on-topic relevant sites and I'm talking 1000's of inbounds not just hundreds.
It seems that some of those 1000 links propagated some SpamRank, BadRank or whatever to destination site. People complaint that Yahoo is strange but to me all has sense after reading of dozens articles about fighting link spam.
Garya, there is a logical reason for those serps. It's a machine creating those serps, and it is done via rules.
What rules do you suppose are operating to create those serps?
One can't adjust their site's makeup to this formula....
I only just noticed that listings for my site/s have dropped but perhaps this is not finished yet.
Hows it for everyone else?
