Yahoo Update Underway Options

[rustybrick]

Do we need popcorn for this update?

[cre8pc]

candy. For a little variety!

[alstefani]

I don't understand what is going on? I had about 100 pages on top 10 for 2 months on mid-traffic terms, 200-500 searches/month(wordtracker) and now nothing appears anymore. My home page is on page 4 for a competitive keyword and my site is indexed fully. Slurp is visiting the site every night like a maniac.

Any ideas?

[Michael_Martinez]

It takes a week or two for things to settle down at Yahoo! when they update.

[sanity]

Yup I wouldn't be stressing just yet alstefani, give it time to settle down.

Popcorn, candy...how about chocolate!!!

[Renee]

I'm there with you on the chocolate. Sublime single origin chocolate. Oh heck, I'll settle for Hershey's assorted miniatures.

[AbleReach]

I vote for Screaming Yellow Zonkers, or maybe Cracker Jack for prize value.


Elizabeth

[Ruud]

I've just returned from vacation and have been reading about this update here and there.

I find the two weeks settling or adjusting time fascinating. Google seems to haul it over and make a tweak here and there; Yahoo seems to emulate a yo-yo.

Now naturally by performing a set of standard searches before and after you can get an impression of just what might have changed. But what piques my interest is this two week time frame. Is there anything special to learn there? Is what we're seeing a roll-out of changes? Or do we see results based on sets which have been changed and sets which haven't been changed yet?

A good number of webmasters report their site bouncing up and down in the rankings. Often these webmasters also report that the number of indexed pages varies: from 3000 down to 8, back to 2000, down to 50, back to 3000, etc. That the number of pages in the index doesn't only go up but also down suggests a rollout of changes, right?

Following this line of thought, applying my regular set of searches to check the SERP quality would get me snapshots of Y!'s individual steps, wouldn't it?

[Michael_Martinez]

I'm not sure you can trust the results while the index rollout occurs. The two-week time-frame is just an estimate that several of us have adopted for sanity's sake. It seems conservative enough to cover the event but short enough to allow us to plan for some checking when the window has passed.

[sanity]

> for sanity's sake

Thank you!

Good points.

[Caissa]

Hi All,

This is the first time I have fallen froom grace in an update. Strange, I checked my logs and I am still getting about the same amount of traffic from Yahoo. Most of my keywords have gone from top 10 to top 30.

Even garnering top spots, Yahoo only brought in a tenth of my search engine traffic. and 1/25 of my overall traffice. What percentages do you find?

Is the update over? It has been 10 days now.

Many thanks!

[Michael_Martinez]

Well, actually, I had a pretty busy week last week and haven't checked Yahoo!. I got caught up in the July 25 Google update, where a lot of listings that I had seen drop over the past few months came back stronger than in a very long time. I'm still trying to figure out what Google did. Only a few people seem to have noticed the change (mostly people who are asking why they lost their rankings in a small number of forums).

The oddest thing about this Google update is that they seem to be reporting fewer "results" for many search expressions. I suspect they have kicked in some sort of spam filter, because I haven't seen a Spamad site in days.

I'll look at Yahoo! and see if I notice anything bizarre.

[Michael_Martinez]

Well, it's hard to say on the basis of a dozen or so test searches. The results look a little different from two weeks ago and seem to be relatively stable (I have tried to remember some searches I've run in the past week or so).

I am noticing some domain inheritance in terms of importance. That is, some secondary or deep content pages on link popular domains, where the secondary pages have very few links, are coming up first in some very competitive searches (Yahoo! reports several million results), but similar pages get lost in the shuffle if there are more than 10 million results.

I am seeing some significant emphasis on title tags and Yahoo! directory listings, but nothing really different from the way Yahoo! did things before.

It looks to me like they updated their database but not their algorithm.

The original announcement from July 20 is here:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000158.html

I'm not sure about my Xenite listings, but they have definitely increased my SF-FANDOM listings. So, like they say, the index is larger and some of the results have changed accordingly.

I would say it's probably done rolling out.

[Caissa]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the "update"! Glad I do not depend on Yahoo for business because they put me in the top 30 from the top 5 just about everywhere. I have the links, the content, the title tags, and the directory listing. So I do not know why but cream always rises.

Glad Google and MSN still love me. I have worked hard to give my visitors exactly what they want in content, So they will find me eventually no matter where Yahoo decides I belong

I just hope they make it easier for their customers on the next update.

[Michael_Martinez]

The Yahoo! directory listings definitely affect your appearance in the search results. It might be possible to use Yahoo! Local to provide some alternatives to primary directory listings. I haven't thought about that before. I am sure that most people have still overlooked the power of the local listings at Yahoo!, MSN, and Google. These are free listings for what appear to be high quality links (HINT: Has nothing to do with PR).

I'm keeping my eye on the local listing sections.

[bwelford]

I just noticed an astonishing increase in the backlinks showing with Yahoo!. Yesterday the SMM website had 101,000 backlinks with Yahoo!. Today that number is 182,000.

Google still shows 437. Go figure. The website gets mucho traffic from Google and very little from Yahoo!.

BTW if a name such as Yahoo! includes an exclamation point, am I correct following it with a full stop as I just did. :?

[Michael_Martinez]

I always write it as Yahoo!.

[Ruud]

Google and showing accurate backlinks is like asking the meteo for an accurate forecast: it won't happen.

Yahoo is very backlink happy. The number they show is astounding. MSN is ... well, MSN. I usually use Yahoo to get a good picture of backlinks.

I still see a number of sites with good content, no shady SEO, and the only thing that seems to be bad about them is a number of bad, bad sites linking to them. I'm going to dig into that further: it can't be that Y! would do this to a site just because of those backlinks.

[Michael_Martinez]

One would hope not. It's bad enough for a search engine like Google to tell people "be careful who you link to". If Yahoo! has gone off the deep end by penalizing sites because of who links to them, there is no middle ground left for the Webmasters.

[Ruud]

...and it would become too easy to bump a competitor