Yahoo April 2007 Update

Weather Report indicates April 3rd start...

[BillyS]

From Yahoo Search Blog [p7.hostingprod.com]:

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update will roll out this evening and will be complete very soon.

I have to admit, I was looking for information on the last update and found this. I didn't even notice a change...

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:43 am (utc) on April 5, 2007]
[edit reason] Added URL [/edit]

[textex]

One of my sites tanked. Naturally the one I added more content to and have been working on the most....

There are google group pages that do not exist and have not existed for several months...yet they still rank in the top three for very competetive terms.

Still seeing those spam pages developed on college sites. Don't know where these come from...maybe student accounts?

Lots of cloaked stuff too...

[marketingmagic]

Another one of their pointless updates where nothing updates.

God I'd love to see them actually SHAKE the serps up. I don't even remember the last time this happened at Yahoo. Anyone else recall?

[jakegotmail]

I def. wouldnt say this update is pointless. For a long time we have ranked really well in google, and not so good in Yahoo. Our rankings in Yahoo are really starting to mimic google now. This is def. a great update on our end.

[seoArt]

I've seen a definite shake-up in the areas I watch. I'm pretty dissapointed so far. Hopefully it's not over with.

[mlxwizard]

Our listing is still just what was in dmoz years ago or some manually inputted entry that is not accurate. I even added the noodp tag and still they use the old data.

I'd be nice if they actually looked at your meta tags and indexed using that info.

[irr1449]

One of my sites went from 40ish for all its keywords to #1.

[marketingmagic]

Not seeing much in the way of changes in my categories. Slight shifting, but basically the same ole same ole.

[crobb305]

The worst set of serps I have ever seen from Yahoo. The downward spiral continues. My comment has nothing to do with how well my site's may or may not be doing. I see pages ranking that have descriptions written in other languages, junk pages on subdomains, etc. Hardly worth my time mentioning here, but this thread made me look. :)

[tictoc]

April Fool's is over Yahoo.. You call this an update?

I am seeing Wikipedia ranking higher and higher in Yahoo... Why even bother searching in Yahoo if all you get is an instant link to Wikipedia?

[jdMorgan]

mlxwizard,

As of the end of February, Yahoo! has begun supporting their own proprietary robots meta tag value. You might want to try:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir">

Yahoo! announcement [ysearchblog.com]

Background:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

Jim

[workingNOMAD]

None of my sites appear in Yahoo now since adding Adsense. Hmmm.

[MLHmptn]

ca.search.yahoo.com........Hmm...Very nice results Yahoo.

search.yahoo.com...........Hmm...Why so different and what was really updated? New sites came out of your domain age filter? A little sprinkle here a little sprinkle there? Woohoo! You'd think my site tanked in Yahoo but I'm surely still in the top 10 but amazed at how terrible the sites around mine are. WIKIPEDIA! WIKIPEDIA! SUBDOMAIN SPAM, geocities sites and CNN which has a mention of the keyword ONE TIME in the entire page.

.ca results are unbelievably great Yahoo! Get with the program!

[Marcia]

Yahoo! .ca is a different algo, different filters are applied. It's almost tempting sometimes to move a couple of particular sites to .ca hosting companies for the local IP.

[Liane]

They just added more weight to the domain name, page title and URL. That's all. Pretty pathetic tweak if you ask me. SEO 101. The spammers and domain name speculators are gonna love this update!

[jakegotmail]

@Liane and how do you know this. any proof?

[synergy]

I'm still seeing the same stale results that have been showing for the last 15 months.

[Jimville]

Wow! .ca looks great! Does this mean Y really does know how to produce good results and for some reason chooses not to?

[angiolo]

Yahoo Canada seems to me the Yahoo serp of 2 years ago..... probably it haven't yet been updated.

[atlrus]

I don't know, Yahoo Canada looks pretty patethic to me... Although we rank in the top 10 for our keyword, it's just us and one more website - the other 8 are: two hacked websites and six blog-spamming blogs.

And yes, it looks like there is a lot of domain name weight added to the Yahoo.com results, I can clearly see this using two of our websites for comparison.

[onlinethrills]

I've completely vanished from Yahoo, and until recently I used to be on the first page for many specific searches such as < specific search terms removed > Weird because my Google and MSN listings are basically quite fine. My website has little homepage content but plenty of good links coming into it. I checked recently and I'm not in the first 100 listings at all for anything. Weird.

< no specific search terms, please >

[edited by: tedster at 2:22 am (utc) on April 8, 2007]

[Liane]

@Liane and how do you know this. any proof?

The proof is in the pudding! Do a search ... any search and you will notice that URL's containing the word or phrase searched for come first. Next comes those with URL's containing the word or phrase in the extension file. Next is the title, etc. etc. As I said - SEO 101.

Only huge or very old and trusted sites with massive numbers of inbounds seem exempt in the rare cases where you find they have beaten the "in URL", "in extension", "in title" pages.

<Added> When I say "massive numbers of inbounds" take that to mean "relatively". There are only so many legitimate links to be had in some industries, so "massive" for them may only be a couple of thousand ... or even less.

[edited by: Liane at 9:58 am (utc) on April 8, 2007]

[onlinethrills]

My title tags are very limited (as in few words) and very focused. This still doesn't make a difference. All the rules that have historically applied for me don't.

[trinorthlighting]

I guess the update kicked in a bit in the US. I am seeing positive movement in our serps and the results look better.

[junai3]

I see changes, lots of internal pages showing from larger sites in my topic area. But the good new, for me, is that one of my sites that was previously penalized has now broken the top 20 for my main key term.

I had contacted Yahoo about the penalty and they removed it about 2 years ago, but since that time my site never broke the top 50 on any one given day. But it usually was out of the top 100.

Maybe Yahoo is letting some previously penalized sites back in? In any case, i hope it sticks.

[Drum]

My rankings dropped for many of my pages.

When I looked for my pages that have dropped I noticed that Yahoo has them indexed, however those pages have a totally blank cached page with a message:

"We're sorry, but we could not process your request for the cache of"

Looks like Yahoo broke the cache on this latest update.

[atlrus]

Yes, our website just got totaly wiped out from any ranking, because Yahoo was kind enough to "index" our CSS, and it shows it as #1 for the site: command...I honestly think this search engine has a great potential, but God is it run by idiots or what!

[Zamboni]

Do you think this latest update might include a Yahoo tweak to change the way they rank sites from Canada in the U.S. serps?

Are most of the companies that lost ground in Yahoo.com Canadian companies?

[seoArt]

I'm still seeing some flux in the results.

[mlxwizard]

Keep watching, I suspect better results are on the horizon.
If your're running a clean, content rich site, it's ony Yahoo who will suffer by listing duplicate trash pages, like I am now seeing.

Don't scramble to make any changes just yet.
Wait for the dust to settle, becuase I'll tell ya, over the past few years, a LOT of dust has settled on the Yahoo SERPs!