Update Tim - Yahoo Update

Noticing changes across the board for a number of industries

[nuevojefe]

Some pretty signficant changes across the board. Doesn't seem much of an improvement in most of the sectors i've checked so far.

Definitely some jumps though, still trying to determine what factors may be more/less at play.

[nuevojefe]

Understand your frustration but this is total disinformation:

It can not have Google Adsense (mine does but is NOT a junk directory site) and can not have any affiliation type links

[edited by: martinibuster at 9:58 pm (utc) on April 4, 2005]
[edit reason] spelling [/edit]

[LeoXIV]

I just checked one of my KWs (max bid $7) and the top 10 results are totally different from yesterday! I remember somthing similar happened a couple of months ago.

To those whose index dropped from thousands to hundreds, are you an affiliate site? do you have google adsense on it? why is Yahoo dropping you from the index?

one of mine had Adsense the other one didn't. They both dropped. Wrath of Yahoo!

[edited by: martinibuster at 12:02 am (utc) on April 5, 2005]
[edit reason] Spelling. [/edit]

[bostonseo]

I got killed in this update. One of my websites which is state specific for phrases like 'widgets in colorado' and all states is now non-existent on Yahoo and was top 10 rankings on 100's of terms. When I checked the number pages indexed by Yahoo; I checked this on MarketLeap Link Poplularity tool. I have 8 URL's indexed versus over 200 that I had last week.

Any advice?

[paybacksa]

funny... I had a #1 in Google for a year up until Feb 2, but it never got attention from Yahoo (page 11 or so was best performance).

Today it's #1 in Yahoo! Definitely a paid search keyword (Adwords bids are up to $0.80) and it has Adsense on the page.

[httpwebwitch]

My most devastated sites (indexes dropping from hundreds to zilch) are indeed sites showing Overture (now Yahoo) paid advertising links. But many others with the same advertising links were unaffected by this update.

[microlinx]

Survey...
My question to everyone is this:

If your site position changed in this recent Yahoo update...just a YES or NO will do for each letter...

A. Use Overture Precision Match? (Y or N)
B. Use Overture Site Match? (Y or N)
C. Is your site over 5 years old? (Y or N)
D. Does your site use Google Adsense? (Y or N)
E. My Site rank Improved: (Y or N)
F. My Site position was De-rated: (Y or N)

My reply is: A-N, B-N, C-Y, D-Y, E-N, F-Y

[oagady]

A-N, B-Y(but not the home page, one of internal pages), C-N, D-Y, E-Y, F-N (my search position improved dramatically - jumped to the first page on almost all of my key phrases)

[jaffstar]

Yahoo seemed to update my BL , my site has not changed much. Went up 120 places :)

[EBear]

Y, my site improved on many keywords.
N to everything else.

[chinkchink]

for keyword "WIDGET 123": A-Y, B-Y, C-Y, D-N, E-N, F-Y
for keyword "WIDGET123" : A-Y, B-N, C-Y, D-N, E-Y, F-N

And here is another interesting fact:
My site is optimized for keywords "WIDGET 123" and "WIDGET123" since 2003.
It is well known in our industry that, many people refer to "WIDGET 123" as "WIDGET123" - including Google! (G usually come up with very similar result for both "WIDGET123" and "WIDGET 123" searches). Before 2005 we were ranking in the top 20 for "WIDGET123" and top 30 with "WIDGET 123".

But in late January, we got notified by the manufacturer that their trademark application for "WIDGET123" got rejected and the product is now officially called "WIDGET 123".

So we got on our site and change all "WIDGET123" to "WIDGET 123" so as not to violate any copyright law. Y! seems to have recognized that change soon enough and we were ranking better with "WIDGET 123" than with "WIDGET123". (Which make sense since we no longer have the term without space on our site)

But after this update, we are back to pre-2005 ranking -- top 20 for "WIDGET123" and top 30 with "WIDGET 123" -- even thought "WIDGET123" can not be found on our site anywhere!

I can also tell you that Yahoo is still not seeing "WIDGET123" & "WIDGET 123" as different names for the same thing like Google does. Using the term with or without a space in Y! yield very different results.

Other than the fact that Y! might had reverted back to an older index... I cannot come up with any other explanation for this.

[crobb305]

Could Y be penalizing for having too many backlinks?
If so, that is horrible. Thousands of scraper sites have linked to me without my permission. We all have this problem.

C

[catchmeifucan]

It seems to be Yahoo dropped my site because I have too many backlinks gathered in the short time.

[nuevojefe]

Looks like another shake up, and backlink update perhaps (different than the normal flux).

Seeing some blog spam sites de-listed in a few areas I watch. These had been around for awhile.

[junai3]

Went from over a thousand pages indexed to just the home page being indexed. Of course this dropped my from the SERPs

[blend27]

seems like they giving a break to a small folk, no ads - home run, directory listing, add +10 up or more...

Good clean refresh.. Great Job Yahoo! Just Need some more filters on proximity of KW, some scrapers still get thru... - no good...

[JeremyL]

Yes, definitally a shake up. The duplicate pages dominating certain serches have been thinned out dramatically. Now 2-3 pages per 20 compared to 10 pages per 20.

[irritated]

It seems to be Yahoo dropped my site because I have too many backlinks gathered in the short time.

Thats simply non-sense, links are a good thing - always have been and always will be.

To think that they would screw you because you are a successful website, and/or are popular, authoritative, or what ever is so wrong it cant be the case.

[tonmaster]

I think that the April 1st update was a very nice improvement but since yesterday morning it seems that they made some more changes and the result is really terrible I think.

[Miklo]

Not so good for our website, we have dropped from 3 to 42 for our main keyword.

Could it be that we haven't been spidered yet? Does anyone know what the new criteria are for Yahoo to gain a top 10 ranking?

[subbu]

I'm not sure what happened - I've got a new site that wasn't returning in Yahoo's results prior to Fool's Day - and then after 4/1 I was just stoked to see it getting returned in the top 5 pages for most keywords. Then I noticed an even bigger jump in our Yahoo traffic - checked out a few keyword phrases and saw that rankings improved even further - and then a huge drop - and now a big jump - as of three days ago my rankings are better than they had been earlier.

I think they're still tweaking their algo.

[xxxxxpp]

I'm so happy, the yahoo update moved my site to the nr 2 position on my main keyword. Still there now after 2 weeks, so it looks stable.

Go yahoo

[George Cooper]

My site which dropped from #1/#2 on April 1 to #4 or #5 for my best terms has in this update dropped back to #8/#9, or for a couple of terms page 2 or 3. All but 1 or 2 of the top sites aren't even relevant, they're just spam/scraper sites.

Also my indexed page count dropped from 3,800 to 48 in the April 1 update and this is still the case.

Yahoo isn't looking too good.

[Essex_boy]

This is kind of weird my daily traffic from Yahoo has been on the increase constantly since 1st April, surely its completed teh update now?

[WebPixie]

My site dropped from 500+ indexed pages to 7 on or about April 1st when Y! updated. Been steady at 7 indexed pages ever since... even though Y! bot has been crawling my site like a mad bot on the loose. Had it on the site the other day for over 5 hours straight. It's sucking up bandwidth daily but no new pages are being shown as indexed.

Has me worried :(

[JanFer]

I was #1 on page #1 on yahoo for months for my best keyphrase, and now I'm on page #2!

Of the sites that are on the first page, including the first three positions, there 6 (6 out of 10) sites that are nothing more than affiliate splash pages or are redirects to affiliate links.

I don't like the new yahoo results one bit. I have a site with content and many pages, and I hate to lose to crap that employs black-hat SEO techniques.

[steveb]

I've got two ten week old little sites, one is five pages, the other three. Yahoo had indexed the entire five page domain, the first time it ever got 100% of anything I have, but now is only showing one page, sort of...

A domain.com search brings up the index page, with "More from this site" and "repeat the search with the omitted results included" links. When I click either one, the only thing that happens is two duplicate listings for the main page are displayed.

Same now for the three page domain too.

Anybody seeing anything like this?

[crobb305]

Steve,

I am seeing this also...for two sites I run. Both were in the free search, but after the update last week all pages are gone except for home page. If I search for each of the home pages--they are listed. But when I click on the "more from this site" button, their urls are listed twice, with differing descriptions. In other words, if I search mydomain.com, and click "more from this site", two duplicate listings for the same domain appear, but sometimes have varying descriptions (one from the directory, and one from metatag). Very odd...almost as if there is a bug causing some sites to be duplicated within Y, therefore dropped.

I do not see this happening on sites with 2 or more pages indexed.

[Essex_boy]

So whats the conclusion? Yahoos running a florida like update?

[textex]

I am seeing the same thing steve and essex.

However, this happened to my site the first update, on the 1st.

Since, Yahoo! has been spidering a page or two day starting this past Saturday.

[tonmaster]

I think yahoo is just playing the with the results, There was a change on April 1st and then one week after
I hope that this Friday there will be another change since results after last update looks very bad and only pure spam sites control it.
I hope yahoo can do better then that otherwise they will loose market share