Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
- Posted March 28th, 2006 at 9:03 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Weather Report
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. Meantime, if you have any comments about the new index, please let us know.
Many thanks!
Priyank Garg
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search
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Grats on that – I was wondering what some of my sites were being crawled 10000+ times a day. I haven’t seen any change yet, but will be looking out more.
There is a balance among keyword frequency – Back link text and Title Tags -
The overall results are fairly relevant by today’s standards …
about on the level of MSN and ASK – but not up to the Google level yet.
It appears that Yahoo is back to the ALGOs being used late last year…
About as much as can be done, has been done with the current ALGOs – tweaking here and there …etc…etc…
Probably the best route for Yahoo to distinuish itself is: Concept Searching and LSI. The Search Tech of the future.
Can ANYTHING innovative really be accomplished with any more tweaks.
The ALGO technology of today has been stretched and molded as far as it can go
That’s good news, but I hope that, in the mean time, you guys have improved the way you rank sites. It still seems like the more links you have, the higher you will rank on your index, but link quality doesn’t seem to be a ranking factor yet..
Well the SERPS improved over the weekend and now all the quality sites are slipping out again…dropping lower by the hour is seems. I am still blown away that 1-10 pages amateur no backlink no text websites can blow away big/updated daily websites. Crazy.
When are you guys stop hand-codding the results on your SEARCH ENGINE?!?
All I can say is it that has been long overdue. Stiil not that good (as I agree with Kyle) and a search for Orlando hotel shows that the number 2 site has NOTHING on it.
I think MSN has surpassed you in revelancy and at least new/updated/improved sites can be found/seen by searches in the organic listing. I was once a proud supporter of Yahoo search but I no longer can state that.
Since the update the relavance of the top ten results has degraded siginificantly. I have a general interest website and now in the top ten for my “keywords” are two results for Amazon books and one for the Open Directory Project. These two could well be included in the top ten results for anything. How is this useful?
Yahoo Update:
Non Spam Webs improved by 5%
Spam Webs increased by 1% – 2%
AV Update:
Non Spam Webs no movement
Spam Webs increased by 10%
MSN’s Update:
Non Spam improved by 15%
Spam no movement
My serps dissappeared from Yahoo – except for maybe one. What happened? I was on the 1st pages of a few serps.
wow great.. this update has lowered high quality websites ..
As of today, these are the most relevant results I’ve ever seen on Yahoo. Still some redirect spam results, but overall a nice improvement.
>It appears that Yahoo is back to the ALGOs being used late last year…
Certainly not as it was a year ago, when there was a sweet romance going on with some of my sites. Now it’s like being jilted or served divorce papers and being sent back to the farm.
In spite of the absence of a few of my sites that used to be in Yahoo’s good graces, objectively speaking it’s looking pretty good.
Well, must have been an April Fools joke, results are full of spammy redirects again today. Nice while it lasted for two days.
Hi All,
As advertised on the blog, I emailed ystfeedback at yahoo.com regarding the new Index only to get a bounce-back saying that that email address was retired.
Got a new email address???
Thanks!
Did they just switch again? The results for “payday loan” got really bad, really quick — I’m seeing a bunch of blogspot and myspace garbage in there, with some obvious doorway pages to boot. Hopefully that is fixed soon.
It seems that the index as switched again. It looks alot like what was being offered up before the last WP.
Oh the joy…
I saw the new index that went up today over the weekend for a day (I think it was Saturday). Lots of spammy stuff for insurance…a huge step back it looks like.
Come on, Yahoo. What’s with these announcements, then changing the index yet again?
Could you guys do all webmasters a favor and stop serving up the yahoo directory title and description for your search results. I know my business better than your editors and would appreciate using the one’s I have spent hours crafting rather than the one your editor took 10 minutes to write and file.
Some result accuracy testing was done on SEOchat — it shows extreme variation in the quality of results at Yahoo. Whatever new algorithm was rolled out is failing — higher quality sites are being ditched in favor of doorway pages and obvious spam.
The top 10 results for ‘cash advance’
1. horizoncashadvance.com — affiliate
2. cashnet500.com — real site
3. http://www.financeking.net/cashadvance.html — doorway
4. http://www.nfscashadvance.com — doorway
5. http://www.checkingadvance.com — real site
6. http://www.200-cash.com — affiliate / doorway
7. http://www.quickpayday.com — real site
8. http://www.cashadvancestat.com — doorway
9. http://www.credit.com/r/cash_advance_short/af=p39934&ag=default — real site, although a strange URL to grab
10. http://www.2minutecashadvance.com — affiliate
Interestingly, those affiliate sites are for the same affiliate program…real smart Yahoo.
Dropped? No, replaced by crap sites and THEN dropped. Good one.
Sarah,
“As advertised on the blog, I emailed ystfeedback at yahoo.com regarding the new Index only to get a bounce-back saying that that email address was retired”
I thought it was just me! On the other hand, do they even read the feedback? Not according to my experience.
My site http://www.wizardofozcostumes.com dropped from #1 to #8. I had been at #1 for over a few months for the term “wizard of oz costumes” not sure what happened.
Also, the #1, and #3 results are from http://www.cebunet.com/cristees who has hidden text at the bottom of the page that is the same color as the background.
Not sure what to do.
As people have noted earlier, the feedback address was bouncing emails the last few days, but that has been fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
And thanks for pointing this out.
Still having trouble with my rankings since the Yahoo update, my site has lost rankings on all high volume keywords, we went from #3 to #65 or don’t appear at all. Is everyone else still experiencing drops due to the update. Will these rankings return back to normal any time soon?
sorry, was getting a page error when I posted, and it looks like it was posted every time I recieved a page error.
I think the “top ten” for the cash advance above are ALL lead gen sites.
My site http://www.mycashadvanceloanillinois.com was dropped too. Nice update! See what Microsoft will pay now! ;)
Anyone know where I can call or signup to serve yahoo search results at our search portal? We generate over 100,000 clicks a month to our website.
I am looking for the amount of rainfall that occured in the month of March, April, and May of 2006 for the area of Mequon, Wisconsin, 53092. I would appreciate if you would either e-mail this information or direct me to the site where I would find it. Thank you.
Sincerely,
John Lawrence
The new results index sucks!
All of my sites that ranked amongst Top 5 for various phrases are now not even in first 50 even and so many stupid pages have been included in the results instead of real sites. What’s up, guys? Whatever happened to the relevancy factor???