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Some results seem more legitimate while they still keep on being scammed by automated link exchange networks, at the same time they keep on penalizing legitimate site.
IMO it is a little better overall, still there are bugs in this algo that do not reflect 1/4 billion dollar investment for sure.
There's something about Yahoo's serps, a random factor, that screws it up, giving out some oddball results after position five in certain searches. In other searches that I monitor I'm seeing the exact same core mistakes.
With tremendous respect for the hardworking people at Yahoo, and I know they work hard at this and are very passionate about what they do, but I'm not seeing the breakthrough in relevance that people are waiting for.
The other thing that bothers me, and this may seem cosmetic but it's not, is the way they display snippets from the pages. It looks unappealing to have four to five random lines of text from a web page. The serps look like badly translated text. It would appear more coherent and make more sense to the user if Yahoo used the meta description tag. That's what the description tag is for, right? To describe what the page is about. Would look cleaner.
It looks like they are giving weight to news sites or sites that are news related.
Ie a search on blue widgets may produce site pages with news streams containing the words rather than sites with pages specific to those words.
Also they have moved back towards showing top level domain pages rather than the page with the content on.
Previously i noticed that they did master delivering the pages that were the most specific on your site to the keyword search. This is now lost. Whilst the previous serps were not 100% at least they delivered the most specific site pages even if they had missed some perhaps more relevent sites from the serps.
IMO they should switch it back and focus on the previous algo rather than roll out this drastic change which frankly has not improved the serps one bit imo!
Saying "well, it's better than MSN" may not be saying much, but I don't think relevancy is their problem so much as speed.
On page is almost a complete-non factor with y now...looks like recips are back in favor after a long fallout...i think they are TRYING to place weight on the authority of the domain itself, but it's pretty hard to tell as it's not real good yet :)
This is for ALL search engines, but Yahoo is caught up badly in it. If a page, or site is down for a long time, please remove it from the index. I mean, man, even the title will say something like page removed, or deleted blog or whatever. Surely, if a page has nothing on it but account suspended or closed, you can get rid of it no?
They rolled out another adjustment last night and the serps look very much improved again as at now - well more focus back on revelency again anyway. I hope the current set sticks!.
To be fair to them they have obviously rolled out the first set of results, adjusted them, rolled them out again and have adjusted them again. So they must be taking revelency seriously imo.
Also in some of the commercial sectors im watching the results are absolutely spot on - i do wonder if they are working off more hand editing or taking into account Yahoo directory. Either way in some areas they have managed to get all of the authority sites you would expect in the top 20 of the search which i think is very good and puts them ahead of google for quality.
They do lose ground however on the three/four/five keyword search results compared to google but overall, this is a step forwards again for now
Mind you, knowing Yahoo they will mess them up again tomorrow!
Rich
We completed an index update over the weekend. As a result, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. You might also be seeing a temporary spike in crawler activity. As these things go, all this should stabilize in the near future
Very informative.
* My website is hosted in the US, not the UK, and I don't have UK targeted content.