July 14, 2006
Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
If you’re tuning back in to the Searchblog after watching the World Cup, then you?re just in time for our first weather report of the summer!
We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.
Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form.
Please write in and let us know what you think.
Thanks!
Rajat Mukherjee
Yahoo! Search
Strange results
Thanks for putting my site 3 times on the same page.
As usual results were better before the update.
What with you guys You had the best results over google and msn.
Not anymore?
You guys don’t get much comments here. So i will kiss up and say thanks for the update. We thought we noticed something today, just needed your confirmation.
This is one of the best Yahoo! updates I’ve seen. Congrats on the much improved relevance.
Please give webmasters a way to remove old pages from your index. You have millions of old page that have been putting out 404 errors for years, but they are still in your index!
Thanks for the weather report!
The Ca. search looks much better as far as results
http://ca.search.yahoo.com/
This results are a joke.
They are so poor this looks like a bug.
No authority wharsoever.
the results before this update were better……….
thats all i can say….
You call this an update? Are the search engineers smoking crack? This is horrible! I’ve never seen such unrelevancy in my life. Not even when MSN came out with their initial Beta!
Your .ca results are at least relevant. Is there a switch that just didn’t get turned on or what?! This is sick!
Can you use CA results till you fix this update
http://ca.search.yahoo.com/
I anticipated this new Weather Report in a reply on the last Weather Report post … just slight improvements, the most part of the spammy stuff is still holding top spots, so IMHO Yahoo! is still beyond MSN ( not to mention Google ).
Yahoo.co.uk still has a poor version of the index mainly seen on Yahoo.com and Yahoo.it etc
There are strange geographical results showing for the UK. Previously a .co.uk site hosted in the UK would be higher in Y!.co.uk than in Y!.com, mathematically correct of course.
Now it’s the opposite, higher results in Y! are showing low in Y!.co.uk.
I hear from most of people that they lost key rank in yahoo since the update. I think this is Temp. just wait couple days.
In Italy i don’t see any change in serps.
Hmmm…I have to agree with those who say that the .ca results are better, they are!
An an SEO and site builder, its nice to see that at least someone gets to see my sites (even if they are drinking Moosehead).
I have no idea why you all use such cr@p for the .com results. I guess that you are still selling your listings as a way to generate cash and have given up on offering relevant results to the US consumers. Shame on you…
After analizing SERPs for over 50 keywords I watch, I just can’t find a motivation or something logical about what’s happening with the current algorithm.
If before there was a focuse on keyword rich content, then few months back Yahoo! started to emphasize the importance of backlinks, now I see top spots being hold by spam subdomains ( most of them being redirects ) which don’t have neither good content or big numbers of backlinks. Is there anyone really understanding what’s going on at this moment ?
Overall, the update appears to resemble the relevancy Yahoo of about one year ago.
This is a very useful add-on to the SERPSm and a good idea to implement.
but one question: Why did you limit it to the top 5?
Yahoo! Research
How useful were the first 5 results at the top of this page?
1
2
3
4
5
not useful
very useful
Yahoo! Research
Thank you for your feedback!
I think the results were more relevant before the update and I agree with what’s said above, the .ca results are far more clean.
The results before this update were a lot better. Now serps are more spammy and irrelevant.
Some of us webmasters have spent a lot of time on our sites so they have good relevant content and still be optimized for the search bots, but now all that work has been thrown out the window. It would be nice to know to exactly what your looking for now! From the looks ok alot of the results you now want poor contenet and spam!
Deja vu all over again. 1 year ago this week Yahoo unleashed pure hell to the webmaster community and it has just happened all over again! Not surprised, actually!
I have a 100% white hat site. I have put so much work into this site as have many legitimate webmasters their own, and to be snuffed out in a blink of an eye (by someone at Y! with a God complex and a loose finger on a switch) a whopping average drop of 150 positions for each and every keyword!!
Just Disgusting. I have seen this happen to countless sites that are ’solid sites’ and that have not changed in years.
It seems that the ‘middle-class webmaster’ has taken a very hard hit. So, by defaut, spam has risen to the top and even some non-optimized ‘authorities’ in little niche (non-semantically matched) categories where they don’t belong.
A ploy to lure other smaller businesses and individuals into their site match or ppc programs? Perhaps. Summer is a slow month after all.
This update is indeed pretty sick to say the least. I absolutely agree with the comment further above in this blog.
I just got of the phone with a colleague of mine who was in tears over what this debacle did to her 3 businesses. An absolute shame.
Years down the drain for many.
Here’s to next summer…
Dan
Ok heres a good one. Since the update one of my sites dropped from #5 to #50 overnight (lots of good content and resources) and an article I wrote to promote the same site, submitted to a article directory is listed #6 for the same phrase, (not so much content or resources).
Hmmm??? Wait a minute, there is another site in the top ten, what, what, there is nothing on the page but a couple of links, that guy sure put some time and thought into that page. How does this new rating system work??
From what it looks like you guys ran some filters since Friday. The results always look bad at first till the tweaks. The results look good to me now.
Please remove old pages!!! They are not harmless. It seems that their presence penalises the new ones that they are not listed because of similar content.
I made some search for popular keywords and I was terrified with the results. I was able to find 3 relevant sites on that search on #8, #9, and #10. The first 7 spots are redirects, not working pages, and pages with just a banner. Over the last updates on this year, the relevancy of Yahoo is going to 0.
FC: with the abudnance of detailed examples you’ve provided, we should have no trouble tracking down the problem.
The results I am seeing is horrible. I agree with a post above. Last year is when Yahoo took a MAJOR decline as far as serps. Sure there was spam but at least there wasn’t wide spread damage to good sites (namely middle class sites). Such damage has been getting worse and worse until now the spam is taking top positions again because you all have nothing left to show. Please stop fighting spam and start REWARDING good sites.
Why give examples? Us webmasters see nothing as far as feedback from SE’s anyway. So what is the point.
Ok here is one. This one is a so so example. The results used to be better.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=homemade+shampoo+recipe&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&x=wrt
#1 I can handle
#2 Is a dog shampoo. Used to be #1. No big deal.
#3 Is ummmm…quality????
#4 If from the #1 site (guys you gotta learn to group)
#5 and #6 is from a very good site. A compeditor across the board.
#7 Who knows it doesn’t load
#8 Dog shampoo
#9 What the HELL IT THAT!
#10 Ok now 1 whole sentence on the subject???
#11 Scraper
#12 Decent sight. May want to actually direct searchers to the shampoo recipe page!
#13 Has a recipe.
#14 Has a recipe.
#15 ummmm…
#16 has recipe.
#19 Is a content scraper even scraped from us.
The results start to degrade after that.
We get to be around the 100 range down from #2. I don’t think we deserved that spot but a hell of alot better than the 90-100 range. We did make some directory structure changes a few months back using 301 to new pages. Links may not be passing. Yahoo does have the correct pages so that is good.
Why give examples? Us webmasters see nothing as far as feedback from SE’s anyway. So what is the point.
Ok here is one. This one is a so so example. The results used to be better.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=homemade+shampoo+recipe&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&x=wrt
#1 I can handle
#2 Is a dog shampoo. Used to be #1. No big deal.
#3 Is ummmm…quality????
#4 If from the #1 site (guys you gotta learn to group)
#5 and #6 is from a very good site. A compeditor across the board.
#7 Who knows it doesn’t load
#8 Dog shampoo
#9 What the HELL IT THAT!
#10 Ok now 1 whole sentence on the subject???
#11 Scraper
#12 Decent sight. May want to actually direct searchers to the shampoo recipe page!
#13 Has a recipe.
#14 Has a recipe.
#15 ummmm…
#16 has recipe.
#19 Is a content scraper even scraped from us.
The results start to degrade after that.
We get to be around the 100 range down from #2. I don’t think we deserved that spot but a hell of alot better than the 90-100 range. We did make some directory structure changes a few months back using 301 to new pages. Links may not be passing. Yahoo does have the correct pages so that is good.
Why give examples? Us webmasters see nothing as far as feedback from SE’s anyway. So what is the point.
Ok here is one. This one is a so so example. The results used to be better.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=homemade+shampoo+recipe&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&x=wrt
#1 I can handle
#2 Is a dog shampoo. Used to be #1. No big deal.
#3 Is ummmm…quality????
#4 If from the #1 site (guys you gotta learn to group)
#5 and #6 is from a very good site. A compeditor across the board.
#7 Who knows it doesn’t load
#8 Dog shampoo
#9 What the HELL IT THAT!
#10 Ok now 1 whole sentence on the subject???
#11 Scraper
#12 Decent sight. May want to actually direct searchers to the shampoo recipe page!
#13 Has a recipe.
#14 Has a recipe.
#15 ummmm…
#16 has recipe.
#19 Is a content scraper even scraped from us.
The results start to degrade after that.
We get to be around the 100 range down from #2. I don’t think we deserved that spot but a hell of alot better than the 90-100 range get the site name from my email address to know what site. We did make some directory structure changes a few months back using 301 to new pages. Links values may not be passing. Yahoo does have the correct pages so that is good — A big plus in my book considering Google can figue anything our anymore.
Jeremy,
Here is an example for you. Search San Diego hotels. The #2 site, Live.net - San Diego was sold over 6 months ago to Microsoft as part of their Live.com rollout. Your directory listing states that “Live webcam pointed at San Diego bay.” when in fact the url redirects to Live.com.
Hope this helps.
Why give examples? Us webmasters see nothing as far as feedback from SE’s anyway. So what is the point. Sarcasm right back at ya!
Ok here is one. This one is a so so example. The results used to be better.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=homemade+shampoo+recipe&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&x=wrt
#1 I can handle
#2 Is a dog shampoo. Used to be #1. No big deal.
#3 Is ummmm…quality????
#4 If from the #1 site (guys you gotta learn to group)
#5 and #6 is from a very good site. A compeditor across the board.
#7 Who knows it doesn’t load
#8 Dog shampoo
#9 What the HELL IT THAT!
#10 Ok now 1 whole sentence on the subject???
#11 Scraper
#12 Decent sight. May want to actually direct searchers to the shampoo recipe page!
#13 Has a recipe.
#14 Has a recipe.
#15 ummmm…
#16 has recipe.
#19 Is a content scraper even scraped from us.
The results start to degrade after that.
We get to be around the 100 range down from #2. I don’t think we deserved that spot but a hell of alot better than the 90-100 range get the site name from my email address to know what site. We did make some directory structure changes a few months back using 301 to new pages. Links values may not be passing. Yahoo does have the correct pages so that is good — A big plus in my book considering Google can figue anything our anymore.
Don’t you love all of these double and triple posts. Gotta fix the form guys.
If this update is any indication of what’s to come on Yahoo you just shot yourself in the foot and will forever remain chasing Google as the #1 SE.
There is NO ryhme or reason to the “updated serps.” I see NEW spam left and right, actual authority sites blasted into the “WWW ETHER”, and some sites that should be gone still there.
Are you sure you have engineers over there at Yahoo working on an actual algo? Or are you so preoccupied with this (who cares) “new look” that you are just throwing things in the air and leaving the SERPS lie where they fell?
I personally thought that Last year before their fall update that they had a chance at being real compeditive to google. Google had a year worth of crappy results and Yahoo could have made some major gains. Since then it has been a rollercoaster in their serps. Again get back to rewarding the good sites not focusing on the bad site. It seems like you are nuking complete cities to kill a few terrorists.
Ok here is the #10 result I put it at #9 by mistake but #10 is the WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!
http://www.minoxidil4less.com/hairloss/homemade-recipe-shampoo.html
Umm and our site is down to the 90-100 range???? Give me a break!
What’s the point of a weather up date, did you loose the previous complaints?
Yahoo Questions, are run by teens and Spammers? Good Move.
But you are not alone Yahoo, Looks like MSN has decided to join you serving up non relevant sites and Adds.
Why is yahoo always so inferior to google and msn?
when is the new update coming?
Things look like they have changed a bit again. See some improvements for us (on that term I mentioned earlier) but the junk is still there. I hope you guys get this thing back on track. I think us webmasters are hard on you all because we know you all can pull off better serps than you have recently.
This update really lacks ryme, reason, planning or forethought. Overall 50% of my site went up dramatically … 50% went down dramatically. In the end I break even… but that still doesnt change the fact that the sites that dropped should rank much better… the sites that came up lack merit alltogether. I think you folks reaqlly shagged the pooch on this one.. let alone the canadian results seem wholly unchanged.
This seems like a Google like result set… however missing the relevant content filters….Just when I thought you were starting to move in the right direction… darn shame guys. And no I am not a bitter fella… my bottom line basically shifted from Group A generating revenue to Group B generating revenue…. but the results are less the relevant, topically/categorically based… If you want to run a backlink popularity contest and discredit content… talk to Google as they have that market already cornered.
The results are definetly worse now, alot worse. Try searching for GM Parts
1 Can’t buy parts there
2 Can’t buy parts there
3 YES, does have something available
4 Nothing more than an image with an email form
5 No Parts here
6 YES, does have parts
7 What is that?
8 Nope, cant buy parts here
9 Again, nothing more than a image with a form.
10 Can’t purchase parts here
So basically if i wanted to purchase GM Parts online. Yahoo results show 2 out of 10 sites that can actually do this. Before the update, 9 out of 10 offered GM Parts for sale.
Ok so you got a little feedback. May we have some feedback also? Is this where you want to be or do you agree that this is a step backwards? Do you expects so added changes? What can we do as webmasters to add quality to your search and be rewarded for it? Is there a common problem on the webmaster end for many good sites that are buried? Are 301 passing necessary ranking factors through (links) or is it a “start over” type thing?
Also…
I noticed that a more correct page (I seen this on our site last night but has changed back) to show up than a page that mentions and links to the correct page. Eg. An semi-related article that links to a the more related page shows up and overrides the listing for the more related page. Noticed this occurance more frequently since fall of last year. Our home page would override positions of a completely related article that once had the position.
Thanks for the feedback
Horrible update unless you are looking for completely unrelevant results. Poor decision.
301 redirects don’t seem to work for many sites. Old sites that are no longer needed or used for testing purposes by webmasters are being picked up as the production sites even if the site does not have any URLs or HTML/Scripts at root server level. I know this as a fact from many of our non-production sites with htaccess and 301 as well as with disallow in the robot.txt, and many other webmasters I speak to have the same problem. You search for widgets and get old widgets with the wrong old site that should have been dropped or redirected months ago.
I know I should not expect yahoo! to be relied upon as a search engine, the site is a good and successful portal, news and directory as well community resource, a search engine not yet. Only 9% who use yahoo use their search, the rest visit yahoo for mail and other features, Compare that with google’s 75% of visitors use the search function, that you can say is a search engine (see Alexa and other rating sites).
Pity though, if yahoo! get serious about their visitors who made yahoo! the number 1 destination on the net, they could do something to make sure at least 40-50% of visitors use the search facility hence in my view will take a lot of business from google that’s for sure!.
Why only 9% trust yahoo search and 91% would rather close their window and type in other search engine’s URL, must be relevancy!
If my posted comment get deleted, at least I’ll know yahoo has taken it on board, if my comment is visible, others can join the petition to improve yahoo!
Everyone… I have come to one conclusion. Just look at the submissions in this blog. Yahoo! can’t even give us a submission form that works without errors (causing people to resubmit again and again)…. do you really think that they are a “SEARCH ENGINE”?
Aha… I know… they’re searching for their engine… obviously they’ve lost it!
Most of the problems on the form here is the data does go through but in not visible after or after other submissions.
As far as 301 redirects yahoo seemed to work ok with our site on a file extension change. It just seems like any external links to older versions are passing. Now uprooting an old site and redirecting to new sites…others have said there may be trouble.
Yep if you hit refresh after submitting the form the posts show up.
I’ve been a fan of Yahoo! Search for 2 years or so and I have the power to recognize that Yahoo! made me a bit of money so that’s why I still read this blog posting my observations. I have to give something back at some point ( because that traffic from Yahoo! I had some time ago was basically FREE traffic ), so here I am reading others posts and offering my suggestions.
I bet that building/maintaining your own search algorithm is extremely hard, but I just don’t get what happened with the algorithm of some months ago when I was seeing way MORE relevancy than now.
If I’d have been Yahoo! ( which I’m not thought ), I’d have kept that and only worked on getting rid of the spam that was within the index at that moment, instead of working on something that looks completely NEW to me …and does tolerate spam way too much.
I really have to wonder if this algo got it right. I did a search for Cell Phone International Prepaid Phone Card and results gave me this.
physics.scsu.edu/~dms/wwwboard/messages/94338.html
Which is redirected to a non edu site.
New results are terrible. What happend yahoo? I can’t find old sites that I bought stuff from, they are no longer in search result pages…
Dusky,
You just hit the nail on the head, great post.
Let’s see if Jeremy pokes his head in here again and reads your post. Seems like he was very vocal when posters were not offering examples and now that some have he is silent..Jeremy, where are you????
I received a mailer from yahoo yesterday ( just a few days since the update), for Yahoo! Sponsered Rearch Advertising. Is this update timed to coincide with a mass mailer campaign for paid search results. Hmmmm!!!???
Rob:
I’ve been pointing some folks on the search team at the examples provided. Believe it or not, they’re useful. Expect more changes soon.
Aaron has a posting about this on seo-book-dot-com, and he includes a screengrab of the Yahoo SERP with his commentary on quality of links and why he thinks they were included in the SERP for the search, “SEO”.
Jeremy and others - it could be useful for you to glance at his screengrab and the comments.
“I’ve been pointing some folks on the search team at the examples provided. Believe it or not, they’re useful. Expect more changes soon.”
Thanks for a bit of feedback. Any timeframe on expected improvements?
I have a site which has been jumping about all over the place the last few weeks and has settled at position 20 for my main keyword after being in the top 5 for the last 3 years.
At least 12 of those above me are just classified ad pages (bit like adsense stuff)
And a few more are just redirecting to other sites only about 4 seem actually relevent.
Mine is a 3 year old site with relevent(i think) content and I use no weird stuff.
Why do I feel cheated? I thought search engines chucked bad sites out.
Not sure if I am asking a question here or just moaning but if anyone has a view on this let me know
Jeremy,
Thanks for the reply. I am glad that the examples have helped. I am looking forward to seeing the improvements whenever they roll out.
Cheers!
Thanks to those who submitted examples in their comments. I work in the search team and getting your feedback on our changes is a vital part of our ongoing efforts to continually improve the search experience. We can’t comment on each of the queries given as examples in a public blog like this, but they are all used as input for determining future improvements. The more details you give to reproduce a problem, the better we will be able to deal with it in future releases.
I’ve looked into the 3 examples given and was pleased to find I do not believe they represent cases that got worse as a result of this release as was indicated in the comments. It is possible to find queries where Yahoo! Search doesn’t provide good results (the same is true of every competitor in the search space), and we will continue to improve these queries over time. Since this post is related to a new release, I want to clarify that none of these examples appear to indicate a new issue as the result of the release.
To demonstrate that we do actually look at these results, here are my personal thoughts on the examples given.
homemade shampoo recipe
Analysis: Very minor re-ordering of results. Position 3 moved to 1, position 4 and 5 reversed. Top result is now a homemade human shampoo (which I felt was the intent of the query) instead of a homemade dog shampoo. Positions 9 and 10 are mirrors of pages that were in positions 9 and 10 before.
San Diego hotels
Analysis: The result the poster is concerned about, #2 does appear to have been bought and re-purposed by Microsoft, so I’d agree it is a bad result. However, previously it was position 1, meaning there’s some slight improvement (although there is certainly room for further improvement in the future).
GM Parts
Analysis: Results are slightly re-shuffled. The two results the poster listed as being good were #3 which used to be in #4 position, and #6, which is in the same position as before.
Our mission is to steadily improve relevance to reduce the number of queries we do poorly on. In the process, some results may shift, but if you look at enough queries, you should see an overall improvement across the board. Thanks for all your feedback and keep the examples coming for this release and all future changes we make.
homemade shampoo recipe
“Analysis: Very minor re-ordering of results. Position 3 moved to 1, position 4 and 5 reversed. Top result is now a homemade human shampoo (which I felt was the intent of the query) instead of a homemade dog shampoo. Positions 9 and 10 are mirrors of pages that were in positions 9 and 10 before.”
#10 is useless! No it is not new but it is useless. Where did #2 go? Well how about around #101. Now tell me how you move a page that fits the query well from #2 to over #100 now but you mirror #10??????????????????????????????? Which is complete junk. Again I did ask about 301’s working correctly as this may be causing problems. A little feedback on this would be nice.
BTW - Thank you for the feedback. Much appreciated.
Mike,
Thanks for replying to all of us on this board. It is nice to hear back from you all from time to time (we know how busy you all are). I am sure that we will let you know of any other relevant issues that are found.
Have a great weekend and keep up the hard work.
Well I see some tweaks on yahoo search. Now the first 5 on Yahoo match Google.
They spent a whole year trying to copy google’s results. I could of done that in a few hours.
Our firm runs several of the top sites online and the results on Yahoo seem very odd. Website with very low page ranks and little links show up top. While more established site rank lower. The results before were far better. I think Yahoo will loose many more searches with these new listing because people don’t want crappy mom and pop sites. They will turn to other search engines for the top tier player. We have certain domians know that show up in the top 10 that we had basically forgot about or do limited business.
We have one site that dose $15 million online drop 18 spots and another site that does $60,000 a year move up to #5 on a top keyword. Oddest thing I ever saw. There is a reason these sites should not rank well but Yahoo feels they are better then top tier sites. Wholesale sites rank well for retail searchs, my wholesale site ranks better then our reatil site that get 20 times the traffic and 30 times the business. And 1000 times more links. All in all it’s a wash for us, it will just increase business on our lower end site and take traffic away from our real top tier sites which is fine.
I stopped content match today also for all top tier sites since we can’t rely on yahoo for free clicks to subsidies there poor performance on content match. Google will gain more market share, and I think that’s bad. I would like to see Yahoo do better, I hate to see the Internet dominated by 1 search engine but that’s the road we are on. Yahoo was doing well with the last update even though we feel in ranking overall it was better. This update is based on no page rank, content, or linking. I saw some odd sites that had nothing to do with the searches show up in the top 10. This was not the case before in over 95% of the search. They were on the right track hopefully that can fix it before users jump ship when all they get it low quality sites.
Here is an example: #1 spot for term leather jackets went to streetleathers.com
Site has a page rank of 2 and all spam. This will only case people to spam more when they see this.
They have one site of mine that is not even ready yet at #1 for a major keyword. Honestly I could go on and on and on. Google won’t even rank any of these sites and yahoo has them #1
It’s always good to have a few crappy sites as backup. All our lower ranking sites saw a huge boost, but Yahoo will pay with lower clicks on ads and less searches. We just lowered a bunch of bids and removed content match. We will flood more cash into MSN and Google were our search results and paid click both show on the front pages. We see this helps with conversion rates. We just raised all bids on MSN and Google to cover for this mess.
Gets even worse then I thought type in “Motorcycle Jackets” #4 result is this site motorcycle-jackets.20mn.com they don’t even have any content, page rank of 0 and two words on the site say “Site fermé” which is a redirect. Looks like a mess. I really could go all day but who cares, other search engines will pick up the slack.
Thanks for killing the rankings on a site of mine. What do you have against it?
Now the results show on first pages spam,blogs,groups and sites with 2-3 words and no relevant content.All the good sites dropped like hell.Nice update indeead.It’s like reading yahoo serp’s backwords.DO SOMETHING!!!
The update on the 14th was great.
Today, something has gone horribly wrong!
Put it back!
No reason to use Yahoo anymore, since its now a bad copy of google with junk added.
Search engine rankings now for relevancy as of today.
1. Ask.com
2. Google
3. Yahoo and MSM
ranking 3 months ago
1. Yahoo
2. MSM
3. Ask.com
4. Google
As you can see Yahoo and MSN have really been going downhill lately.
That is some what better, still see Spam Duplicate Web Sites…
Much better than MSN Search.
Mike,
Your post “GM Parts
Analysis: Results are slightly re-shuffled. The two results the poster listed as being good were #3 which used to be in #4 position, and #6, which is in the same position as before.”
Don’t you find it odd the only 2 sites that are decent, are from the old listings? The rest are junk and are all new listings. You dont see anything wrong there?
Try this, search for Nissan Parts.
#1 does not sell parts.
#2 is ok
#3 is ok
#4, is just a redirect to another site. And the site has no content and is a part of duplicate sites.
#5 doesnt sell parts, its a discussion board, enthusiasts site.
#6 that’s Nissan’s corporate info.
#7 is another site with nothing but an image and redirects to another page.
#8 #9 and #10
i personaly don’t like the sites, but at least they offer nissan parts.
Mike,
My opinion, you should put the old algo back in place. Let us test and give feedback on new algo’s, do your adjustments, then go live with new updates.
Maybe setup a SEO regristration for us to be emailed to test new algo’s coming out. It’s free Q&A and great feedback about new releases. No other SE does this. Yahoo could be the first to somewhat rely on the searches input for their listings.
Sorry to say, if things don’t change soon, I’m changing my home page back to Google…
Good Luck
What I think is, the older results were better.
The new results have NO RELEVANCY whatsoever..even after the tweak…
It has just brought in more spam. In old results, I was alteast able to find some relevancy, but now…nothing!
Bizzare:
You couldn’t be more specific, could you?
Odd thing, the tiles are switching from the directory title to our meta title about every 30 minutes lets stick to our meta title.
In the UK directory I checked the top site for a certain popular keyphrase. When I checked the backlinks, hardly any of them existed! Perhaps the linkexchange.com script had something to do with it ….. Would it not be possible to detect this and reject the sites using this cheat?
Sorry, that should have read linkhelpers.net.
A large proportion of the top sites I see are either blogs are have stacks of links from blogs. Most of these sites are rubbish or contain redirect scripts. If search engines must include blogs in their SERPs could a separate directory altogether be considered? Blogs were never meant to be commercial sites and the huge number in the serps are severely downgrading your results.
Thank you, Yahoo, for dropping almost 5,000 of my pages from your index. Who needs SE traffic anyway? :( This new algorithm is taking no prisoners.
I’m very frustrated. My 46 sites dropped from top10 positions to nowhere 9999+. All are still indexed and spidered. I have no affiliate links or some crap on pages. The pages got better positions after update 13.july, but from 19.july they started drop down and on 22. july completely dropped to nowhere.
frustrated, but nobody from yahoo tell me why. The people from MSN answer question during msn update but yahoo….. no answers. frustrated.
Back to directory title? Checked (site: mysite.com ) full of old pages. We use a 404.htm to redirect the client, our robots tag is disallow: /folder/ but you still index the old URLs.
Delete them…
One comment from above about re the yahoo.ca, I agree it was very relevant.
Is your geotargetting working OK? I am finding a lot of .com domains on US servers when I search uk.search.yahoo.com with the ‘in UK’ box ticked. These sites don’t even have the term ‘UK’ in them generally, and since we are specifically searching for UK sites the contents of these are pretty well irrelevant. I can appreciate that lots of .co.uk and .org.uk sites are on US servers but could you not filter out the other sites that are neither UK TLDs nor UK hosted?
Yahoo Search Engine is Terrible! No wonder the stock is nose diving. Whatever they are doing they should hit the back button and go back atleast 12 months….
I have wrote into Yahoo several times and have gone back and forth with them for about a year or more about this issue and I constantly get the run-around.
Basically, the issue is that I have a very large site that is being filtered out of Yahoo. The site is listed in the Yahoo directory and has been listed there for years. My home page ranks very well in Yahoo but my internal pages do not appear in the Yahoo search engine at all and I get very very little traffic from Yahoo, although my home page ranks very well….
I have spent extreme amounts of time studying how my internal pages do not appear and I have given up several times. Most of my frustration has come from identifying terms on my pages that appear no where else in the world (employee full names on pages)
These terms rank very well on all other search engines, but not Yahoo!
For instance, and employee name search on MSN and Google will bring up my pages number one, but on Yahoo the page will be in the number 12 position. Even though the terms do not appear anywhere else on the web.
This has been going on for a very long time and this is on a very large site so I really would appreciate a contact from someone that can help me out with this.
I have spent many years learning and examining the algorithms that these major search engines use.
I am very frustrated that this is happening and I have tried to look past it many times, but I do not believe that I should ignore this forever. Something should be done to fix my problems.
If I did something wrong that would be one thing. Or if this was something that patience would rectify I could deal with it, but this seems like it is going to be the way it is forever, and I just can’t have that.
I am loosing half of the traffic that my site receives. Over the past year we are talking alot of revenue here…..
Blog spam is still working very well, unfortunately. Here is how some are doing it, this ad appears in a very high profile blog:
Want to see your ads here? Claim your ad space by writing to *******. Starting at $25 a month see your text ads in 2000 indexed pages of ***blog, ***blog, ….etc etc
Many of the sites at the top of a particular highly profitable category use this method to substantially help their sites to the top. Blogs are supposed to be online diaries and means of communicating ideas and experiences, not as easily-spammed commercial vehicles which, sadly, an awful lot have become and blog spam is severely degrading Y! SERPs.
Yep, we went from #1 result for months to MIA. Great job yahoo. With no changes to the website how does one go from #1 listing to MIA. After the last Goog update we went from #7 to #5.
General results are AS relevant in both Goog and Yahoo in my opinion. You both intersperse garbage results from ebay and amazon. Will stick with the SE winner with the majority of search traffic (Google) and not worry about Yahoo at all.
This is the worst update i have seen for Yahoo.
My site dropped it’s rankings from 8 to 256.
How strange is that??
Yahoo…. How do you pull this off right before 4th QTR. Lost about 1/5 our rankings, which isnt the end of the world… But to be replaced by sites that are clear spam…..
Yahoo search has become a huge joke as of their July 13th Update.
I don’t know what everyone is complaining about. My site has stayed the same in all but two keywords which actually rose 1-3 slots. Guess my search terms are less spammy than others.
Good luck to the rest of you. Man, I feel for ya!!!
Have all the changes finished now? and are you now adding new data back into the index. We noticed that whilst Yahoo was crawling it seems very slow at adding new sites to the index. I also note that lots of backlinks seem to have vanished, have you penalized inbound links to webmaster sites?
I can’t say if your update is good or bad yet. But I think it is unfair to affect sites that are white hat and have previously good positions in the index. Some could say you are deliberately forcing customers to go down the PPC root? Surely Yahoo must have a tangible reason for the update and an end goal. It would be nice to know the truth.
Given that the public has put Yahoo where it is today it will also be the public that ultimately destroy Yahoo.
Have all the changes finished now? and are you now adding new data back into the index. We noticed that whilst Yahoo was crawling it seems very slow at adding new sites to the index. I also note that lots of backlinks seem to have vanished, have you penalized inbound links to webmaster sites?
I can’t say if your update is good or bad yet. But I think it is unfair to affect sites that are white hat and have previously good positions in the index. Some could say you are deliberately forcing customers to go down the PPC root? Surely Yahoo must have a tangible reason for the update and an end goal. It would be nice to know the truth.
Given that the public has put Yahoo where it is today it will also be the public that ultimately destroy Yahoo.
Hi, Is the update finished yet???
I hope not, for Yahoo’s sake, the listings absolutely suck.