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Why the hell don't Y or MSN take the lead and employ a few thousand editors to manually remove offending sites to a set of key crieria and reduce the spam sites across tens of thousands of key search phrases.
Whilst they will probably never get rid of it completely - if spam masters start to realise that IP blocks, types of sites and DNS registr's are being targetted - then maybe some will start to focus a little more on decent quality sites - as opposed to MFA / Scraper / Blog spam.
They have the resources and should have the foresight to help filter out at least some of the general c**p that seems to be so difficult to algo out of their results.
That aone would start to get some press and get them some traffic back - cos by god do they need it...
Just me 2c's
We went from top five before update...to 10-15 first wave of the update...to 40-50 in this new stage.
Probably more weight on keywords in Url.
Old sites and new sites score better ( new sites probably for a better on page optimization).
call me crazy....
Would be very dumb of Yahoo! to fall into that 'give 'em crappy results so they click on Sponsored listings' conspiracy. Google is such a monster they can get away with it. Yahoo! on the other hand is fighting a losing battle and by doing that, they will lose user retention.
I have noticed what may be a bug in the cache.
when using inline styles in hyperlink tags the cache shows the html instead of the link. Not sure if this was the case before or not, but it definately is now. I also don't know if this affects spidering or not...i guess it depends on if yahoo relies on the cache pages to spider or if it's sepparate from it.
Update:
After further research, the bug appears only if you put inline style in front of the href element of the anchor tag
"Some sites are going up, some are falling down a little bit...
I have the impression that the Yahoo algo refers, as Google, to their cached databases.
Probably more weight on keywords in Url.
Old sites and new sites score better ( new sites probably for a better on page optimization). "
I do too (along with intentional misspellings), and Wikipedia is starting to show the same pattern.
We seem to be on a slight decline with this update - not sure why at this point. We recently (over the last five months) put in a lot of effort to improve content.
Same for MSN, these guys supposedly have big brain researchers working on search algorithms for years, yet they still can't make it even close to right.
They consistently have issues indexing legitimate websites while spammers get a quantum leap. I am not even talking about the rankings yet...I don't think they are even close to finding anything substential to improve quality.
Finally I think that they just don't care, the lower their SERP quality is, the higher their PPC income. Of course, that means they take us for stupid but what was I thinking? Ethics?
On a happier note. This thing isn't over yet. I sent Y! several nasty letters about how my 'most relevant of all keyword sites' was dropped to #313 earlier today. It's now back up to #42.
Most of the shifts I am seeing and the pages that don't appear to be ranking properly are index pages. Kind of reminds me of an old fashioned Google Update where the authority index pages are wiped out in order to calculate everything else and then added back in.
[edited by: Powdork at 4:39 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2006]
But this update is so funny. Looking at some of the top ten results and finding msn myspaces which no longer exist, blogs and sites which require log in to view contents, and of course many results from google groups and blogs. Where is the sites that have valuable content in which people are looking for?
Now I am real happy about the results, since I know most users will hate them and go to other search engines :)
What did you actually say to yahoo Edited version, I guess.. And did it help your case? Or was the increase in serps or movement going in that direction anyway?
On the other hand, maybe I did get someone's attention. Now when I click the send feedback link, i just get a blank page.
