Yahoo Update Oct. 25, 2006

Yet another update to SERP's

[MLHmptn]

Just noticing a completely new index early this morning. Either a filter was just tweaked or we're seeing a new index again. Not so drastic of changes as the 2nd to last update but significant. So far it looks good to me. Relevance looks good Yahoo! I'm surprised I'm saying this!? :> Of course I'm probably not checking the correct niches for authority and relevance but in my niche all is good!

Now...Analysis...

[JoeSinkwitz]

I missed the edit window, but felt compelled to follow up...

This very competitive search and its plural phrase have normally been pretty different given Yahoo's current abilities at stemming (i.e. it isn't that good). However, these are now identical 1-10 results. I'm convinced that it was a hand job, which is in pretty poor taste given this market tends to explode in early Nov through the holiday season.

If a search is commercial in nature, then wouldn't the most relevant results also be commercial? To place several .gov and .org sites well above their normal ranking in order to push consumers to PPC isn't the best course of action Yahoo; had it been a natural occurance it could be overlooked, but it is not.

Cygnus

[RichTC]

Its most odd

Ive just had a look in on the search, its a bit hit and miss. I dont know why they bother with steaming, they just cant get that right and its provides little advantage anyway.

As for the serps overall i dont know what they are trying here. Its like authority sites with pages about say "blue Grey Widgets" fall back in the serps on a search request about "Blue Grey widgets" but the same page will rank for search terms like "Grey widgets with Blue"
- This looks more like a desperate move to try to get authority sites to purchase PPC adverts from them to drive traffic to pages they should rank for anyway and would have done previously.

Overall, ive noticed not much change in traffic levels for sites i work on so far but i have noticed a shift in the search requests that bring that traffic - most odd

In all i dont see any improvement

[Shurik]

Since oct 30th they completely reworked first pages for a few very competitive commercial terms in my niche. They didn’t leave a single commercial site between result 1 to 10. It does not look like manual editing though - too many low quality informational sites with AdSence on them. Organic results on the first page look appalling. IMO it is a deliberate move to boost their PPC during holiday season. Yahoo is pathetic.

[kid_disco]

I'm seeing another reshuffling of the SERPs today. I also noticed something I haven't seen before at the top of the results:

Yahoo! Survey: How useful are the first two results below?

Not useful 1 2 3 4 5 Very useful

Is anybody else seeing this?

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:29 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed URL. Flikr? PhotoBucket? [/edit]

[Whitey]

Big changes?

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