November 13, 2005
Fifth Weather Report: Yahoo! Update Tonight
We will be making changes to the index tonight. You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. This update will be complete by tomorrow (Monday) morning.
As always if you have any feedback for us about the new index please email: ystfeedback@yahoo.com. Please provide specific feedback that includes either:
1) Specific query terms where the results are good or bad.
2) Specific domains that you feel are either being under or over indexed.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search
I hope it doesnt roll out old stuff i.e. results similar to any previous updates.
Thanks for the update. It’s nice that Yahoo! has started the weather reports, makes the webmaster community feel better and know the Search Engines care about what they are putting out.
Don’t know when exactly yahoo started the weather report but it’s a very good thing!
When Yahoo.com updates its index, does it count worlwide?? I mean for index update for europe, japan and other countries?
If someone can answer this would be very much appreciated.
thanks,
hope this is better than the last update
The number of idexed pages of my site has fallen from 900 to 7! Are these results definitive? Can I wait for a change in the next hours?
Disturbed greetings from Spain.
I really like the results. You seem to be giving a lot more emphasis to anchor words in backlinks, no? That is my general impression.
“hope this is better than the last update”
It isnt…. Its horrible.
I just lost all of my pages in Yahoo. I worked so hard on my website, watched it grow up the ladder over the years, only used good effective methods, no spam or tricky seo tactics. I was listed number one under hundreds of different key words. Now, only my main two pages are listed under the search engines results. I have just been completely dessimated. This was my whole life, my only source of income. In one evening, yahoo has just destroyed my entire livlihood. Tim, I am begging you, please please please fix this major problem. I am drowning!
Tim,
Will the next update be soon? I can not survive another few days without being back in the search engines, seriously. I think I may know what the problem is and so I changed it. I don’t know, can you please give us an estimate as to when the next update may be? I am completely desperate.
Becca
seeing lots of spam…
Tim,
For our keyword phrase whit over 2 million sites indexed for it, the top 20 results are the most relevant I ever saw in Yahoo, so far.
Our site came back in the place it belongs, thank you!
Great job Yahoo!
99% of non-Hand edited terms in my Niche still return 90% affiliate spam, Made for adsense trash and/or flat out irrelevent results.
The only legit merchant and purveyours of quality information that can be found are those that participate in Paid Inclusion (YSM search submit).
What is goin’ on guys?
I am bitter that my site has been banned and have been begging for someone to point to something that would have caused this for months. I have finally resorted to offering a REWARD for anyone who can point something out to me.
http://seo.canadian.com/
I did finally get a canned email response confirming what I already knew and got a list of obvious things that will get you banned. I would LOVE to see evidence of any of these things on my site so that I could fix them.
It gets particularily frustrating when update after update the SERPs are still rampant with spam. If they were getting cleaned up I would feel alright as a ‘friendly casualty’ of the better good.
PLEASE tell webmasters what they have done wrong instead of these canned responses. ESPECIALLY when hand-editing a site, it is OBVIOUS someone spent a massive amount of time and energy creating an exceptional user experience.
I am happy to be getting some traffic through paid inclusion now, but 99% of that is for my own domain. I also continue to do well with the PPC. Unfortunately, the organic is where it’s at and is what users judge you on.
Thank you!
Jason Bailey
Perfume.com
P.S. Yes I still do love Yahoo! and everything you do for me. I love Overture, I love my my.Yahoo.com page, I love Yahoo! 360 and I do want to see you succeed in this space again. It is a tough job staying ahead of the spammers and I respect that, I am just bitter… very bitter.
1) Specific query terms where the results are good or bad.
Do you REALLY :? think that is a good idea – would it not be better to use Click Popularity and using and archiving tracking-technology data to discover that?
If the SAME IP addresses, withing seconds, are entering and leaving SERPs and Websites at a higher than normal pace – and if they are going to the 2nd page for those SERPs at a higher than normal rate, also, if in a short period of time, they are revising their queiries using the same basic words or synonyms…
THAT INDICATES SOMETHING!
BTW:
When is Yahoo going to introduce its own Free Web site Tracker ;-)
All I see are people griping. Is it so hard to list out the search terms which caused a problem for you, along with a short description of the purported problem?
It’s an OK update. It seems that Yahoo still hasn’t indexed some pages on my site, although they’ve been up for a few weeks. Yahoo does know about the rest of the site. Why so long?
Otherwise, Yahoo and Google are returning similar SERPs (there are some differences) for my keywords.
Hi Tim,
The search term ‘work from home’ is giving me grief. It needs sorting out. When you were in the middle of the update period and the results read 1 – 10 of about 2,290,000,000 my site was in the listings. But now it reads 1,190,000,000 and my site has disappeared along with some great sites that I and my team used to use. Whats going on?
Having never added anything to your blog Tim, your invitation got me motivated.
I think Yahoo may be broken or just too manipulated by the engineers. Yes, my very legitimate site has lost nearly 85% of Yahoo traffic for the past 3 months. The site is still full indexed (although there are a couple www vs. non-www listings). I figured Yahoo would reshuffle us back where we belong. But now too much time has passed and I guess this is how Yahoo is ranking us. Many terms we aren’t ranking for. Ahead of us is a ridiculous mixture of sites. The biggest sore thumb are the sites employing link farms still ranking number one and two.
Personally, if this is the web Yahoo thinks is important, than something is wrong with Yahoo. It has seemed broken to me. The only think Yahoo seems to be getting right is causing me to spend more on overture. But as this continues, those Overture ads might not be so valuable as search volume moves away from Yahoo’s strange rankings.
The update has done well for our terms, and I am happy with the results so far. Yahoo! has been good to us all along, and as we improve and add to our site, our results have improved as well. I assume the same will continue into the future.
Thanks for everything so far!
Tim,
The most recent updates have killed my rankings. Offer site is offers good information and is usually a good experience when visiting. Customers confirm this very often. Any help as to why my rankings were on the way up, then got wiped.
Thanks
Wow, finally the ranking update helps me… Good to see many keywords for me working in top 20. Thanks Yahoo. Hope to see some traffic boost from it.
I launched a new site recently and did a press release for it. Why (for the site’s main theme and keyword) would a release about the site, trump the site itself in the SERPs (when those sites carrying the PR are just rss feeds of the PR and their content is not even thematically related to the keyword)?
Seems weird that a release (about a single domain it describes) buries the actual site that it’s about…
My fingers are crossed this update is over. It’s the first one I didn’t drop off the map when the last filter was applied.
These ‘Weather Reports’ are excellent. They definitely help. :)
You asked in the header of this page: 2) Specific domains that you feel are either being under or over indexed. —someone wrote in the 4th Weather Report about this company, the one with so many sites with the same content, ( with the search term Common misspellings… mentioned) – I see not much has changed there, still on the search “free las vegas shows” when the only thing they say is free is—nothing, nothing is free, they are there because they are a big dog in your ad revenues, and the guy is right, that is wrong, unfair, and twisted. You kicked my pages with similar content for that, no doubt , and they are there for low-resolution page alternatives, almost no graphics, where the other page is loaded with graphics, So thanks for that, you know not all of the world is so lucky to have DSL or even a normal dial-up connection, and you have to take care of them, much like a printer friendly page, and it is on the same domain even though I own many more domains that I could spam with, I don’t even brake a category into more then one page (Vegas show as apposed to- i.e.. joe blow show at the NGM.) They are all on a suitable page unless it get too large, I am a web page designer, not an seo, think we should lynch all the seo’s and then the web would be a better place and your job would be easer.
These are my thoughts on the perfect search alog.
+30% Title —not accurate/relevant -75%
+20% Domain —not accurate or repeated use of key words/sub domains -30%
+30% Contextual use of key words or phrases ——excessive use of key words -75%, unless truly relevant
+10% “meta name=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=” —not accurate or excessive use of keywords -75%
10% “meta name=”keywords” CONTENT=”—not accurate or excessive use of keywords -75%
If the site is useless ( no relevant data, a long list of intra-site links) except for SE ads -DELETE
Overall I see some improvement in the new algo—but still OLD SITES ranking high, I’m talking rank, musty, too old to be relevant sites.
And for the life of me I do not see how the G and MS_ can scan your site and post the new data within a few days and it takes you WEEKS and sometime months when you scan my site daily??? OK, I said my fill, now you can go ahead and delete the last of my pages if that makes you feel better, but it won’t make your SE a BETTER SE.
Still Krap – not as many directory sites, spam sites but still garbage content for the most part. seems to be ignoring pages with very relevent content in favor of ones that have a very small amount of somewhat related content with good title and descrip tags.
dennis—”ignoring pages with very relevent content in favor of ones that have a very small amount of somewhat related content with good title and descrip tags. see my “alog.” above somewhat related content ”
up to +30% Contextual use of key words or phrases ——excessive use of key words -75%, unless truly relevant
up to +10% “meta name=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=” —not accurate or excessive use of keywords -75%
up to +30% Title —not accurate/relevant -75%
If it had a good title the content would be very relevent dito for descrip tags, flies will be here soon modest improvements or not, long way to go, you guys just don’t get it, the pay for inclusion sites that seem to get a hand up would be replace in part by new paid for inclusion sites as the site grew, consider this a farm, you are growing profits, the weeds have taken over your fields.
As share croppers we know that some of our profits go to the boss. You are keeping the crop at a low level and this won’t change until you level the playing field.
You are getting two of the same posts because the transmissions appears to fail, you get a “can’t get this page type page, so you try again. thus the dup. pages.
In regard to my last post:
“level the playing field.”— when one company gets 6-8 listings in the SERPS ( by having duplicate pages under different domains, you eliminate 5-7 “farmers”, to stay with the analogy, one company— one or 2 listings. If we can’t earn money to pay you, you are dependent on the one site. 1 or 8, this seems to be a no brainer see below and count how many ads for different sites these foks buy.
Koenig & Strey Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate —
you are a perfect example of “one company– many, many, domains. I would have sworn under the search “Chicago real estate” you had 8 or so of the first 50 listings a few hours ago, that’s a shame, NOT!
Take heart, under the search “Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate” of the first 50 you have a bunch, mostly sub domains, Count your blessings that I am not in charge, else you would have two. This is what has to be stopped. Yahoo, count how many ads for separate domains these SEO’S have bought. Subtract 2 from the # of listings and that is the amount of sales you have lost.
No offense Koenig & Strey , just want to make my point, and you seemed like a good second example, the Vegas site being the first. There are hundreds of thousands more worldwide.
An excellent Yahoo update – the index is looking pretty darn good – I was a little concerned this past summer when you announced the ‘new’ update along with the massive index increase to 20 billion pages . . . but the gradual “clean-up” / algo changes seems to be working well. Kudos to Yahoo!
This update has not been good for us. We fell out of Yahoo on 11/12 after having great rankings for about 8 pages of our 1000+ page 6 year old site.
I’m confused what has happened. No black hat or spam. No dirty tricks. No significant changes in months but same ole daily updates as always.
Any ideas?
Mike,
Don’t spend energy or time with this SE, concentrate on MSN and Google, get in there and the rest of the pack picks you up (I.E ask.com, dogpile.com…) in my last post here I made an example of a firm with a “I love yahoo” post at the top (now middle) of this thread, Koenig & Strey Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate has 9 out of the first thirty listings in the phrase “Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate” most from the same domain/ with a subdomain (I.E: sub.domain.com.)
Yahoo plays favorites, you can’t depend on them.You can’t beat a rigged game, go with relevant SEs that play fair, even if you rank well here today, next week or month, you could be dropped for no reason. If your industry is time oriented, this SE is totally useless. They update weeks after the critical date, I can’t understand why they keep stale listings, it just makes them look foolish and incompetent. I have, as you can tell, given up all hope on this SE.
I have been very pleased with Yahoo SEPRs until these latest updates. I have kicked my site from the top 10 to the 100-500 PR on some key terms with many junk sites ahead of me. Everything on the site is above the board and white hat so I am perplexed as to why I have been penalized.
Since I am a Yahoo Small Business e-commerce site this has also hurt Yahoo as well. A decent ranking was one of the reasons for my continued loyalty but now I am questioning why I am paying premium hosting fees.
The new rankings have me completely baffled. Using the Mindset tool one of our sites #1 on a shopping search for the term [hurricane claims] and #4 on a research search for the same term. Both of these results make sense as the site offers both general information on hurricane damage and specific service offerings for those who have suffered damage.
However for the regular search results the site comes up #95. If the site is deemed both a quality research site and a quality commercial site how can it rank #95 for the general catchall ranking? This site has ranked #1 for [hurricane claims] and [hurricane insurance claims] for the last nine months.
Other sites we work with have similar contradictory results, ranked #4 on shopping and #11 on research but #46 in the regular results. I’ve been a fan of the Yahoo search experience and was not surprised when it won the RustyBrick relevancy challenge earlier this year. However in the last two months it appears that all of the progress you had made since launching Slurp has been lost. For months my personal searches were almost always done from my My Yahoo homepage. In the past month I’ve used Google in conjunction or solo for my personal searches because the Yahoo results are so poor of late.
These results are horrible, as I can still see Yahoo placing to much weight on h1 tags and keywords placed within the url, Google will always have better results if they continue to use horrible algorithms.
Some listings are better, some much worse. As an example, in Yahoo.co.uk, and using search for “p-o-k-e-r,” (without the dashes) 5 out fo the first 10 results are redirects and to the same looking site.
Complaints without specific queries and/or URLs are useless.
If you want to help us, please include specifics.
Want to solve all the problems? Get rid of Spam and the Free loaders? Let the PPC companies have full rain over the first few pages.
10..20 or more advertisers covers two pages, watch the Free loaders and Spammers start bidding every one wins. No one will care about bad search engine updates cuz you still will not be on the first page.
Not bad guys…keep workin on those relevant results.
>>>>Complaints without specific queries and/or URLs are useless.
If you want to help us, please include specifics.
Posted by: Insider at November 20, 2005 09:46 PM
Your biggest problem has no specific page, It take WEEKS or months to get a new/changed page in cache, last night I made major changes to 2 pages, added one and within HOURS google and MSN has the pages in cache and are delivering them to readers. Not to be a smart A__, but to paraphrase my favorite actor, in my favorite movie ‘you are not playing in the same league, you are not playing in the same game, H___ you are not even paying the same sport’ Get rid of the HUGE time delay, when it matters lose the old pages, and you could still win this. You underestimate MSN, and google has such a media advantage,(as in being the leader), That is one of your biggest mistakes, WE don’t care who has the most results, Give the people what they want and the game is yours, relevant, timely search results.
My traffic gone from 80 uniques per day to 0 :(
the most important thing is that you have to renew your pages fast, people want now quick results…. and to see changes..why should I enter to a page to search if the are new things if you never renew your pages… yes google changes their results in hours.. and you take a lot of time to do it.. maybe because you are focusing in the email services that you give ?
Anyway at the begining yahoo was great because was a web crawler that was the fastes and gave
services for free… and I still have my email of them.. but when you need your pages to be renewed…is a bad idea .. even to TRY TO GET IN CONTACT WITH YOU.. because it is not possible ..
because you for some reason (maybe because you use a different technology… but I am really glad that you didnt sell it to Microsoft) cant renew your pages fast … so what is happening ?
I really like Yahoo, I trust this service but there are some changes that have to be done..
Because I want to see Yahoo .. forever!
So how often do you renew your page ?
You should also put a form to repot and delete dead links automatically.. in that way the users could also help to renew this … rigth now I want to change some results in your web search but I just can’t !!!!
Please do something
Since you will not deal with the SPAM issues, perhaps advertising SPAM methods for the criminal minded is in order here.
When your search bots are full of SPAM, or the volume of complaints increases perhaps you will do something about it.
Here are some recent classics, Ah.. no white on white here, that Childs play.
How about:
Great for triplicate content, benefits Yahoo can triple their pages from 5 billion to 15 billion.
http://www.myweb.com
myweb.com
54.23.5.123/
variations of your dot.com same address and server.
Or Home Page Duplication
index.htm
index.html
add in 15 links on the bottom of the page all copies of index.htm with different names.
These methods will help destroy Yahoo’s results already bad results, and benefit you in the short term.
Share your Spam methods here! Lets incease SPAM everywhere.
>>>>>>>Don’t spend energy or time with this SE, concentrate on MSN and Google, get in there and the rest of the pack picks you up (I.E ask.com, dogpile.com…) in my last post here I made an example of a firm with a “I love yahoo” post at the top (now middle) of this thread, Koenig & Strey Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate has 9 out of the first thirty listings in the phrase “Chicago MLS Search and Real Estate” most from the same domain/ with a subdomain (I.E: sub.domain.com.) ———————————
and in my last post I said your biggest problem is the loooooooong delay in cacheing (actualy in displaying, you have the data, you scan my site every day) but I was wrong, from the webmasters side, that may be true, but as for your readers side, the problem goes back to the example at the top of this post, now they have ten in the top thirty listings in a 5,000,000+ search phrase, and http://www.yourinternetagents.com/ and chicago.yourinternetagents.com/ are the same!!! Those are the only two I checked. no they are not a low res version of each other, so your biggest problem is you let Co’s like this get over on you, or they are paid for inclusion. also you don’t listen to one word written here, I see no changes as a result of any posting here, except that my site is lower in ranking!!!! a little retribution? From now on I don’t care if you go to #9 ( in SE site rankings) or what, you brought it on yourselves.
“I barely noticed an update. Things are looking good. I feel sorry for those who’ve lost their sites but come on.”
You know it is one thing to loose position to genuine quality competition/sites since quality is within a webmaster’s control. It is another thing to loose position because of a glitch or even spammers and needless junk that is thrown into the results.
It is not that Yahoo! owes us anything but if they show “true” relevant results what it comes down to is quality competition. Who can out do the other in quality not necessarily SEO. This is what Yahoo! should focus on and I believe they are trying hard.
“Back on track: Yahoo lately has been giving me much more relevant results than Google. Lately on Google the obvious result gets buried behind a pile of sites I don’t need. I hate that. As a user (not a webmaster) it’s great to have a Yahoo and MSN to turn to for different (and good) results – finally!”
I see far from being more relevant than google. Google degraded a bit. Yahoo was equal if not better up until the more recent Yahoo updates which put them now put them behind.
Sorry to post this hear if its the wrong area but how do we do a request for reinclusion similar to Google’s feature by the same name? My band’s website http://www.heavymusic.com seems to have been removed from the SERPs. We aren’t doing anything black hat to my knowledge although we do reviews of guitars that lead to our affiliates to help us pay for our band expenses. However, all the content on the site is unique so I am wondering if there is another issue. As I say, sorry to post this here is its the wrong place but I can’t find the Yahoo reinclusion request (must be the temporary memory loss). Thanks!
I watched in horror as our Yahoo referrals dropped from 1000+ in the first half of November to 100 in the second half. Every single one of the search terms we used to rank highly on, we’re not even in the top 50 after this update. If we had been replaced by more relevant sites, I’d understand. But where we used to stand, now I see nothing but Spam and link farms. Definitely a thumbs down from me. http://www.secretgardenchild.com
UHG i cant log in, it looks like my account is locked but when i unlocked it it still wont let me log in, it does this to me every night someone please e-mail me and tell me why! h4ck_th1s_b0x@yahoo.com ~peace~
some old sites have vanished or banished i really dont know.they are not cached from a long time.does the insider himself knows what yahoo are upto.
I have finally realized that using Yahoo search is like playing a slot machine trying to get the correct matches to come up. I didn’t realize this until I opened my own web site. Sometimes I come up third (with 2 spammers in front of me). Next time I can’t be found. Not even if I type in my full domain name. It will ask me if a meant another domain name. Another time I come up third (same two spammers on top). Next time I am not there.. not on page 1 thru 50. I am not a gambler. I don’t use slot machines. Why does Yahoo have 30% of the search market? I don’t understand.
My band’s website http://www.heavymusic.com seems to have been removed from the SERPs. We aren’t doing anything black hat to my knowledge http://allthemusic.bravehost.com although we do reviews of guitars that lead to our affiliates to help us pay for our band expenses.
This one I dont get, On this new update yahoo is posting all dead pages in first page , I run free classified site: http://www.beatyourprice.com and I use to be always in first page, since last update I moved to 4th page, and i see couple dead free classified site in first page result on free classified. I can’t figure this one.