Fourth Weather Report: Official Yahoo! Update

Y! weather report says it'll be mild and quick compared to recent ones

[zjacob]

Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

---

From Yahoo Search Blog: "We will be making changes to the ranking of our index tonight. I would expect that this update will be mild and quick compared to recent ones but will impact the ranking of some sites."

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2005]

[rsequin]

We are #4 in Google for our keyword and were #21 in Yahoo for same keyword. Now we are #10 in Yahoo.

[sandpetra]

Big deal - I'm on the first page for a major financial client in the loans market for a very popular keyword (£20 a click last year on Overture) and it generates no traffic!

Yahoo is good to show off seo skills to clients but sucks for traffic.

[edited by: engine at 3:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] language [/edit]

[Frequent]

sandpetra,

If Y! is using your meta description or directory description for the snippet in this page 1 listing that performs so poorly for you on a very popular term...have you considered your description may suck?

If it is pulling a snippet of content from on-page and the snippet is poorly targeted you may want to look at why it chose that snippet so that you can help it find a better one.

Just suggestions for you to consider. My page 1 yahoo listings deliver pretty decent traffic. I'd hate to loose them.

Freq---

[jam2005]

Why does every Yahoo! update end up with one of more of our sites disappearing. Two of them have disappeared this time.

It's an endless cycle - the site disappears, we request reinclusion, get back the auto reply email, resubmit the request again, someone looks at it and realizes that there is nothing wrong with the site and it's back in. When will this insanity ever stop?

[dauction]

jam have you done a 301 .htacess lately?

First time I have ever had my pages disappear from Y and the ONLY thing I have done is a 301 from www to non www

[sandpetra]

Cheers FREQUENT

I'll have a look at it....meanwhile I'm going to start another thread about that very subject.

[martinibuster]

sandpetra,
The reason the traffic sucks is because there is always very little traffic for high CPC terms. The reason it's a high priced term is because of lack of supply, the old supply and demand thing. Unfortunately, there are also many times when there is no supply.

This is how it works.
People check the Overture inventory tool and see some traffic listed for a targeted term. But that traffic could be rank checkers, bots, and webmasters entering that term, not actual searchers. Overture doesn't filter the inventory tool. I suspect some webmasters use bots to create false search terms to keep you busy optimizing for the wrong terms, too.

Always research your keyword phrase before optmizing for it. It's not Yahoo's fault there's no traffic.

[jam2005]

We haven't really done anything to the sites. We haven't done any redirects. All of our other sites are fine and are ranking very high.

[lasvegas]

I'm still showing old results on Yahoo USA for the terms I watch. These terms have been the same for at least a month. Interestingly enough, those same terms I watch on all of the Yahoo International sites are static and exactly the same. They are also brand new results that I have never seen before on Yahoo USA. The only update I'm seeing is on the Yahoo international sites. I guess that means it hasn't propogated fully to Yahoo USA?

[Garya]

I did a test before this update by chance, as i have quite a few websites.
I got a rather interesting results.
after the update my site became #1 for a highly competitive phrase.
What i did was to remove my key phrase from the home page, text, tags
title.
My other sites moved down from #1 to #3 and 5 those have the keyword in the title, text and tags.
Comments please.

[followgreg]

Just one question for you, not really a comment:

- Is the "highly competitive KW" site in Y! directory. If yes I'm not suprised.

....If not, I would love to watch this phenomenon because so far Yahoo is THE search engine that needs on site SEO to work well without trouble except when you are in their directory.
Of course, since they do human reviews on competitive kewyords....some SERP are static forever. Who says of Yahoo it's a search engine and not a directory who? I want to know :)

[Garya]

Not in the directory

[Erku]

How does directory help? I just paid the 299 to be in the directory and was accepted. What changes in my rankings should I expect and when?

The page that they linked me from has a PR7

I am hoping for some positive changes. Is this reasonable?

Thank you.

[NoLimits]

It may have been worth more years ago. The age of the link seems to have a much larger impact on things now.

[Erku]

You you are saying it may not worth anything?

[Garya]

You don't need it no matter what anyones says.

[Scott_F]

It can be worth it. Do a search in Yahoo Search for all your top keywords. Are any of the listings on the first page directory listings? If so, than it is well worth it. I have many clients that are on page one, and it is their Yahoo Directory listing that it there.

Example:
[search.yahoo.com...]

Six out the first 10 listings are Yahoo Directory listings. Tells you something...

[Garya]

Thats a to general term. thats why the directory listings come up.
Give me a break

[Erku]

Scott_F I had noticed the same thing. Well, at least you are getting a good and quality link.

[Freedom]

Just checked a few minutes ago, seems like some of the old results rolled back. Back in the top 10 on some mid level search terms (which is how it was before Nov. 1).

Hope it sticks. Hate to lose those too.

[Johan007]

I see Yahoo are indexing CSS files :/

[isidoros]

"Just checked a few minutes ago, seems like some of the old results rolled back. Back in the top 10 on some mid level search terms (which is how it was before Nov. 1).

Hope it sticks. Hate to lose those too. "

indeed, I see the same thing

Yahoo engineers must be on something strong. I went from #1 to nowhere and back to #1

[energylevel]

We've totally vanished from Yahoo, had been on first page for a number of terms for years.

Our company and web site have been established for 5 years and have a good reputation. Site site was clean as far as I'm aware, yet I see sites taking the piss out of guidelines blatently as usual and getting away with it as they have donme for years..

[dbar]

I went from #1 to nowhere and back to #1

Same here, but not 100% true or sure what it means. I was scanning my logs and thought oh am I back. Clicked on the kw search and sure enough I was number 1. Then I started with a new window, went to yahoo and put in the search, nowhere.

How many datacenters do they have and are they significantly different?

Also, I did a site:mysite.com and in addition to mysite.com/ I also found mysite.com/?source=inktomi probably from way back when? When I click on the mysite.com/?source=inktomi link it goes to a "page not found" because the yahoo link changes it too %3Fsource=inktomi, but if I put the link directly into the browser (mysite.com/?source=inktomi) it pulls my home page fine? Could this be causing anytype of problem or is it only on yahoo site command?

I paid for inktomi a couple of years ago, where are the?source=inktomi links coming from? I also see googlebot coming in on some?

<edit>
Oh and I also found mysite.com/?source=findwhat (which I haven't used in over a year) with the site:mysite.com command, but that one works fine when I click it
</edit>

[sfgirl]

We saw a 13x jump in referrals from Yahoo on Sunday, which looks like it was probably just to our home page. This would make me beleive that our home page is also outranking other pages on the site, BUT other pages' Yahoo traffic looks normal.

Monday's Yahoo traffic dropped back down to a little over 2x the regular traffic.

[Scott_F]

To broad huh?...Well hopefully these are not to broad for you:

All showing up in top Yahoo Search results because of their Yahoo Directory listing.

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 8, 2005]
[edit reason] no specific searches thanks [/edit]

[texasville]

Well, kill me. Yahoo hasn't given me a single referral today. Gone from top 10 to almost non-existent and it's a clean site. Have another site just launched last month and it was indexed by y about 3 weeks ago and now it's gone from the index. What the?

[texasville]

Just did site:command on my site and it is the worst mess I have ever seen. Oooold pages long gone and css have been indexed. The only thing current is my index page.
Yahoo has created a real mess here.

[lxenterprise]

My yahoo caches show somewhat recent crawlings but when I go to the internet archive the history only shows the site crawled over a year ago? Is this a problem that could affect my rankings?

[cabbagehead]

Interesting. Sounds like I just got nailed today. I've been getting good rankings and traffic from Yahoo for almost a year. Then today out of the blue, my sites are all GONE! I mean, use to be all top 10 sites ... now they're nowhere on the first 5 pages.

Anyone know what is going on? I know there was an index a week ago. I guess its still going on? Surely this isn't permanent?!? As mentioned above by someone else, these are all pretty clean sites.

:(