Yahoo's altered SERPs

301 to new domain and Y! results return...

[canuck]

About a month ago I 301'd a website for various reasons to a new domain. Interesting positive side-effect for this domain was the site was getting zero Y! traffic, however, after Y! picked up the new domain traffic levels have shot up.

I know people have their issues with G's algorithmic SERPs, but Y!'s hand-moderated results drive me crazy. At times it almost seems what's best for Y!'s bottom-line rather than what's best for the user.

Plus, good luck contacting Y! to get a review of your website's penalty.

Hate to say it but there's too much $, and too many conflicting interests for human-altered SERPs. I think G may have this one right...

[martinibuster]

Y!'s hand-moderated results drive me crazy.

While some results have been found to be hand placed, this is not true for the overwhelming majority of their SERPs.

At times it almost seems what's best for Y!'s bottom-line rather than what's best for the user.

Ideally, if you search for PLUMBER in Google, Google would read your IP and give you local results for plumbers, not two wikipedia pages and a dot gov site (thus forcing you to click on the PPC ads).

Plus, good luck contacting Y! to get a review of your website's penalty.

I don't believe we are entitled to this kind of information. Sure it would be nice in the case of a webmaster with an otherwise decent site who did something dumb like hidden text. But I don't think we are entitled to know from the search engines why our sites are no longer ranking as well as they used to.

In an ideal world the search engine algo would be able to populate the SERPs with the most relevant sites. But it's generally acknowledged that despite millions of dollars of research they are doing the best they can under the current circumstance. There's a bit of give from webmasters, so I can see where you're coming from in wanting more of a partnership of how your site is used. But speakig for myself, I'm not certain that we're actually entitled to help in ranking better.

[Whitey]

Like any search engine i don't think we're "entitled" to anything, since we don't pay them for those services.

But the angle that i see, is when there are technical difficulties effecting results, it is helpful for both sides to get to the bottom of it to produce better integrity.

The fact that some of us website owners jump up and down when we think we're caught in the middle is probably [ sadly ] of little consequence. But it's worth pushing, otherwise, certainly less will happen.