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The home page on one of my sites was at #1 on Yahoo directory, uk.yahoo.com and www.yahoo.com for many years for the biggest value two word term in my market. Since last autumn the home page ranks at #4 for that term on www.yahoo.com, Altavista, AlltheWeb etc and whilst this is not good news it is something that we can deal with. The listing is exactly that which appears in the directory and the home page is still at #1 for the term in the directory.
On uk.yahoo.com however our home page seems to have been dropped entirely from the web search SERPS for the term. Two less appropriate pages are listed at #11 and #13 but I've searched back as far as #200 and can't find the home page.
I've spoken to someone in Yahoo UK who simply told me that the search engine is now totally automatic and that they don't have an individual effect on results.
It seems to me that whatever the changes in their algorithm something has clearly gone wrong with the uk filter and that our example is potentially a tip of the ice berg.
Has anyone else here noticed anything similar?
Cheers
Sid
I received a reply from their support team. Which was clearly a proper reply after having looked at the issue not at all like you get from Google who seem to always send out a boiler plate reply. So well done to Yahoo for that.
The guy who replied could not find a reason for the problem but comfirmed "the UK search results, which do use a different, localized algorithm".
It seems to me that it is a different localized algorithm with different bugs which need to be investigated.
Sid
The guy I've been communicating with says that he will pass on the info to the relevant developers.
You would think that they would welcome well considered and explained examples of anomolous behaviour and sieze on them in order to root out bugs and improve their results.
I see it as being a bit like a recent problem I had with my telecoms provider. I phoned up to tell them my phone had topped working. They ran some tests and said it must be my equipment and if this was confirmed by their field engineer then they would charge me for the call out. I did some checks and was sure it was not my problem.
The engineer came out and fixed their problem the next day and apologised.
There is no logical reason why, just our home page, does not appear on uk.yahoo for a term where it has been at #1 for many years when it continues to appear in yahoo.com at #4 for exactly the same term.
Therefore they have a bug in their uk.yahoo algo.
Cheers
Sid
Thanks for the information about different algo, thats good to know
