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We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon.
And they also say there'll be some rank changes and page shuffling.
Do they need more shuffling or should they start with a new deck? My input is they need to shake out more of the .edu and .gov sites, flush them from the index. Not useful at all, especially for commercial searches.
Trust me, it's an accident. ;)
this should be interesting to watch over the next few days...
Off Topic - is the Yahoo Shuffle a coined phrase like Google Dance? We should really dub it today if it isnt :) We should ask Priyank Garg to do the "Truffle Shuffle" for making me increase my ppc budget :)
I’m not looking to flame, I really, really want Yahoo to succeed as the Google monopoly is not a good thing for all us, (and I got some stock!) so I’m rooting for you guys. But come on, this is it? This update is the best you have?
I’m an eternal optimist, and not one to ever throw in the towel, but I’m just about to the point of saying when it comes to search; it’s game over. We got Google, we got Yahoo and we got MSN.
If there is a Yahoo representative who happens to stumble across this post; let’s get some dialogue going here; post! Ask for feed back, get some response. You must make some significant changes. If you don’t want to be absorbed by MSN , I am all for that, but man it’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs and two strikes and boy you could really use a hit.
I guess at the end of the day, I just don’t get the plan, I don’t see how this update, or for that matter, the last dozen are going to do anything, even remotely to close the gap.
Now that this update is over we're better off than before, but to put things in perspective, Yahoo accounts for just 7% of my traffic, up from around 4%. Good movement, but if the traffic went to zero tomorrow I'd barely notice.
What does bother me are some sites that outrank me for certain terms. These are sites with very little useful information.
I do think that Yahoo values the age of a page or website. I notice that very outdated information from big sites outrank my current information on the same topic. Google seems to do a much better job of giving sites credit for publishing updated information (even to old pages).
So I agree, Yahoo seems to be overly conservative in their approaches to updates making changes that are barely noticeable. I don't think this is a good approach when Google has such a big lead.
As for Y! accounting for traffic referrals I have seen up to 25% with google being at 50-55%. Granted, if I was hitting on those terms in Google that would have brought me 2 times that but I think people sell Y! way short especially if you can tap into local phrases that are out west in the US. The western US till goes to Y! in nice groves.
I, for one, don't think Yahoo's results are garbage, however I don't think they are very good either. Especially for long tail searches. I could care less if my own site shows up but I do feel many people have the bias you mention.
I consider Yahoo's results garbage because when I attempt to use Yahoo for my own non-seo searches I don't get even close to the results I was looking for. Google isn't perfect either but they are leaps and bounds better than anyone else. It blows my mind that as Google continues to gain marketshare (and capitalize on it) every quarter, that these are the types of updates we are seeing from Yahoo (and MSN for that matter).
>>I mean is it garbage because your site or a clients site has not made it to the top for the terms you or your client want?
No, because of the reason I explained in my post....
Yahoo loves outdated information on big sites. And that is not what users are looking for in today's search engines. They are unable to detect spam as well as Google, so they continue to take the "better safe than sorry" approach. Well, that's getting old after 12 months.
[edited by: MLHmptn at 8:42 am (utc) on May 31, 2008]
[edited by: Guido at 9:25 am (utc) on May 31, 2008]
So this update is a positive for me at least. Last year or so Yahoo's traffic was 90% useless both for me and visitors. No big changes on site, more like stale with weekly addition of content, no link hunting for more than a year - majority of new references and bookmarks are truly natural and point to homepage. But on the other hand the site was well SEO'd even 5 years ago. Shortly after I stumbled into WebmasterWorld ;)
Anybody know how long a site will get re-indexed after being dropped out? I have a good and clean site (rank top on Google, Live and many other search engine) but recently out of Yahoo after May update.
Thanks.
