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[edited by: RunnerD at 6:17 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]
I've thrown my hands in the air with Yahoo. The results are very poor in my market and I have no interest in changing my site to meet their algo of the moment. The work I've done to my site has finally put me on page 1 for Google and I've dropped 17 pages on Yahoo in the process. I'll take that trade off anyday.
[edited by: martinibuster at 3:47 am (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]
I see more affiliate sites in the first page now!
How do you define an "affiliate site"? You should remember that everyone is entitled to monetize their informational website. Many use Google Adsense, some use YPN, some use affiliate links. Unfortunately, Yahoo has a policy in their guidelines that disallows sites consisting "largely of affiliate content". However, they have not properly trained their own staff to spot such content.
"Affiliate content", by nature, is content developed by a merchant for use on an affiliate's site. This content is therefore duplicated many, many times on the internet, and is designed to "push" a product. As I said, Yahoo has poorly trained it's staff to determine which content is "affiliate" and which is not. There are many wonderful, unbiased websites out there that have loads of original content, but have been unfairly "banned" by the ubiquitous narrowminded-assessments performed by Yahoo staff. A staff member sees a single affiliate link and unjustly bans the entire site from appearing in the serps.
Further, to say it is fully acceptable to have Google Adsense or YPN on every single page of a site is 100% hypocritical and contradictory.
If the sites you are calling "affiliate sites" are, in fact, junk, then report it as spam to Yahoo. But keep an open mind to the fact that an affiliate link does not make for an "affiliate site".
Chris
One of my best sites for ad revenue went from #7 to #50 on an extremely competitive search, so for the time being I can kiss that money goodbye. Google takes so long to see results, I had been using my client's results on Yahoo as an SEO selling point in the last few months (I didn't really focus on SEO techniques until the start of this year), because even without Google they had been generating business from it.
Mostly I'm unhappy that a lot of the results showing up for searches related to my clients are displaying junk pages.
People rarely want to look at .edu or .gov sites and ranking them that high is a why bother for generic terms.
The one result that almost made me spit soda was when I saw an ANALOG site as the #1 result for a predominantly digital field, seriously, ANALOG?
Talk about bad results, so I checked the same thing for DIGITAL and some unknown blog popped up as #1 and followed by the Wiki yet again.
It's completely off the deep end.
IMO, Looks very similar to the mess MSN cranked out a few months ago but was smart enough to rollback before they lost the 12 people that use MSN religiously.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 3:59 am (utc) on Sep. 6, 2006]
For people that have been ranking high on "WIDGET" you're probably in trouble but "CALIFORNIA WIDGET" and you're in luck.
IMO, Looks very similar to the mess MSN cranked out a few months ago but was smart enough to rollback before they lost the 12 people that use MSN religiously.
I would second that notion! And props to MSN for listening! Yahoo on the other hand just doesn't seem to care. Honestly if any of you had good traffic from Yahoo and are no longer receiving hits I would recommend investing in YSM as the results are horrendous not only to us webmasters but the users alike. Conversions from my YSM account has doubled what it was when I halted it over a year ago. Sure it might cost a buck or two but Yahoo is giving us an opportunity to get the most bang for our buck out of YSM as the results don't even show my competitors!
It seems to me that new non-backlinked(or very limited) sites are ranking high for keywords in their domain name. In my niche the sites that are in the top 10 are complete non-authority sites that just had their domains registered within the last 4-6 months. Complete non-authority, less than 5 backlinks and extremely low KD. Granted the keyword is in the domain name so Yahoo must think they are an authority! :> It might just be a good time to use parked domains like somebody stated above. Park the domain for Yahoo food with a click here annotation to visit the real site.
Food for thought.....
[edited by: MLHmptn at 5:45 am (utc) on Sep. 7, 2006]
Call me cynical, but I think this is all a scam by Yahoo to improve Overture revenues.
Nothing cynical about this view...it's entirely possible that Y is testing the old "muddy up the serps so people will click on the ppc ads"...remember...the ppc ads have very specific editorial requirements and these can be worked against the organic SERPs for poor titles/descriptions and destination sites with poor usability...
This is a logical approach for creating more revenue...
There has to be a balance between reasonably good results and advertisment, otherwise it might as well be a scraper site with AdSense slapped on it.
There has to be a balance between reasonably good results and advertisement
Exactly and that’s really all their striving for. Search is not a passion of Yahoo; they do it because they have to. Having paid Ad’s along side “organic” results has just become the norm and what consumers expect to see, so they really don’t have a choice.
This recent update was very substantial and it resulted in an 80 post thread here, and not one Yahoo representative even bothered to participate in it. That’s all you really need to know. There’s no passion on both sides of the ball. It’s a shame really because everyone would be better off if they could raise their game and they have plenty of money to do it.
They have always been at (or very near) #1 in Yahoo, which makes sense since people searching for our company name should be able to find the company in a perfect world, you'd think.
After this update:
Site #1's home page is gone from the results (previously #1), replaced at #18 by it's contact page. For it's top search terms (previously #1), it is on the second page of results, despite being the industry leader in it's field. The site is #1 in Google.
Site #2's home page (previously #1) is now at #13. (#3 in Google)
Site #3's home page (previously #1) is now at #2, trailing only it's own contact page. (#2 in Google)
Site #4's home page (previously #1) is now #2 (#1 in Google)
Site #5's home page (previously #1) is now gone, replaced at #1 by a random link page in it's link directory, and at #2 by it's "About Us" page.
The SERPS have many brand new sites that I've never even seen before - terrible websites from very small companies while the leading companies are way down the list, or have irrelevant pages listed. The companies listed have extremely short titles, often containing only the keyword phrase or maybe one extra word. The websites themselves contain very little content, and appear to be relying on the titles for placement.
It seemed like Yahoo was actually doing okay there for a while - what happened? I used to use Yahoo for my own searches but uh...I think I'll have to switch. I can't find anything I'm looking for. Meanwhile, even my own customers who are looking for my website by name can't find me.
Algo seems fine to me.
That isn't from this update, they've been terrible for a while.
Since their only fine SERP's are those who are manually altered and that it's impossible to do on all keywords...
I just did a search for "seo" and the #1 was some unknown site which certainly isn't the most popular. But at least it was fun! :)
Yahoo is a fun playground: when you like to see unrelated/spam/low end sites you can't find anywhere else, not to take seriously as far as traffic amount or SERP relevance.
In fact Yahoo is an adventure, results are almost randomly generated without other consideration than increasing they PPC profit generation...who still uses Yahoo anyway?
...
results are almost randomly generated
Right now with this latest update it really does seem that way, you just cannot create any sort of list of signals of quality that seem to add up to ranking position.
But maybe that works for them someway, reminds me of the story of some guys who put the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal on a wall and then had monkeys throw darts at them. The companies the darts hit, they invested in; story goes they did OK. I really don’t think Yahoo is all that concerned about it. Only problem is they have spent an astronomical amount of money for what you see right now. Maybe they should try the monkeys, be a lot cheaper.
The companies listed have extremely short titles, often containing only the keyword phrase or maybe one extra word.
You may have answered your own question as many people have horrible titles and the kwywords they want ranked for are nowhere near the beginning of the title and then wonder why they go "POOF!" down the ranks when sites with better titles show up.
It's not always the volume of text but the quality of the text as far as responding to what the search engine looks for as far as relevance for the terms.
Makes you go "Hmmmmmm...."
I would spend some time looking at those crappy results and see what they did to get where they are and compare where those terms are on your sites.
Some of my inside pages are ranking high for my key phrase only have a map on it, very strange.
Not a whole alot you can to with these results but just use canada results or msn.
reminds me of the story of some guys who put the stock listing pages of the Wall Street Journal on a wall and then had monkeys throw darts at them.
Monkeys with darts - seems like a fair description of the engineers responsible for the latest Yahoo update.
Makes you go "Hmmmmmm...."I would spend some time looking at those crappy results and see what they did to get where they are and compare where those terms are on your sites.
Not too seem harsh incrediBill but I would have to strongly disagree with changing our sites to meet what Yahoo's signal of quality is at present. Google provides 50x the traffic for me than Yahoo ever did and MSN provides about 4x the traffic that Yahoo did. Of course this is my own situation and others may target Yahoo, but I will not alter my site for what Yahoo seems to think are authority sites. For all we know as soon as we'd alter our sites Yahoo would radically change their algo like they have been doing for the last 6 months or so. Also until Yahoo provides some form of communication with webmasters I have no desire to play Yahoo's game.
Long live Google and Hello MSN! Props to both for providing two-way communication with us.
