August 25, 2006
Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
As some have noted, we rolled out a new search index. As usual, you’ll see some changes in ranking along with what is in the index. We’ve heard webmasters like you love the communication, such as weather reports from us. We are trying to connect with you more directly and enrich our interaction even further through Site Explorer. Please authenticate your site in Site Explorer and join the conversation on the Site Explorer forum.
For other feedback or support issues, please refer to our webmaster resources page. We love hearing from you.
Thanks
Priyank
Don’t understand your new results, its looks very bad, seems to be getting worse on each update, is this yahoo’s plan to have less relevant results, if thats the plan great job.
Slight improvement (very minor).
What about a “NOODP, tag” to solve the title issues in Yahoo Directory?
Lots of foreign sites Website.de, Website.ru in their native language, waste of space.
Plenty of duplicate web sites and pages, remove the offending SPAM and it will be more relevant.
I guess Spam Sites will soon be saying that Yahoo is less and less Relevant?
If you look at the canada site
http://ca.search.yahoo.com
you will see what they are doing, results are good there and in Japan.
Only the us it is poor just to get the $$ from pay per clicks.
Yahoo said the results should be the same and not better in canada, But they are different
but don’t know why means they are lying andn have no explanation.
Seems to be a trend in the US results to get poor results.
for google use google.ca
msn use latin america
yahoo use .ca
These are all much better then there us counterparts
Woah, I think they are worse in Canada. So far I think the results are great. And now I know about site explorer which I didn’t know about before. Seriously, I always have better luck serach on Yahoo than G. I always find more relvent material. On G I always find sites with TONS of G ads in the front page which ticks me off. Yahoo rocks.
The latest update appears to be somewhat Google-like from about 2004
This is a sharp decrease in spam, and the ability to SEO a sites sucess
and a high bias towards established - large sites.
Titles, Link Popularity and Back link keywords still have a significant impact - but it appears to be less important - giving way to Yahoo’s TRUSTRANK criteria - but not as prioritized as Google - but moreso than MSN
It seems this update has done a much better job at finding inner pages for low-to-very-low traffic keywords according to my logs. Previously it was a high majority just main page and now I see sub-pages being found more often. KUDOS
I smell a hint of link age as being important too but maybe I am wrong there.
good job yahoo, seems much better to me.
I think the results are looking a bit better.
Another meaningful update. I’ve noticed that many “hit aberrations” have been cleaned up, and overall relevance is a bit better since the last update. I’ve also noticed that Y! Search is being used as the default search engine by more well-known sites: I’m not surprised. I also search with Y! by default now. The “mouse trap” keeps getting better and better.
Bye, bye, blog search (aka side panel on News Search).
Hello Bloglines’ search…
Looks like a bad attempt to copy Google which is already bad.
Need something better here guys.
All I see are some large sites outdated with alot of links.
Everyone here says its getting better, but when you compare results from older results it is comfirmed its is getting worse. Are you all in denial.
All I see is spam now. My site was doing well the last few years. Over 100 Top 10 keyword listings and yesterday all of them dropped but 3 of them. The others are no where to be found. Now when searching for the other keywords all I see is spam, redirects, cloaking. Just how are we susposed to compete with that unless we do the same. There’s an old saying, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. ”
Lets bring back the old results, if not, all of us will have start spamming the index to compete with the spammers. Imagine what a mess that could be.
I agree with Seoguy. It much much worse then before.
I found a lot of searches where 7 from top 10 results are spamy sites. Some of them automatically generated by programs, some using redirection to completely different content. How this feet with Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines????
Before it was relevant results in the same searches.
I guess it needs to start using blackhat SEO in order to get good positions in Yahoo these days.
The search explorer is mess as well. Yahoo cant authenticate many sites and no answers no help. I so from my logs that Yahoo spidering my site no problem, but why they cant authenticate? As I said no answers no help.
Looks like it got worse tonight, now its really bad, Yahoo now ranks
as the #4 or 5 search engine down from #1 a few months ago.
This update appears great for the sectors I watch. Before this update, we saw a lot of sites that had the text that the enduser was searching for, but had no real relevance for the enduser. This update has done a great deal for relevancy and translating what the enduser is *really* looking for, even if the enduser doesn’t know the most effective way to search for it.
You were getting better till this update.
Check out the #1 and # 4 results for the term
pimple treatment
http://www.pimple-scar-treatment-cream.com
http://www.acne-pimple-treatment.com
Yeah pretty bad stuff, i did a search for real estate in my area .
Only 2 realtors came up both were the same company, A bunch of strange sites came up just because the keyword was in the domain name, also some russian site moved up to the 1 page. Time to get some new people at yahoo. Yahoo is now a non- search engine.
by the way, The canada results are the best puts them above google and msn.
http://ca.search.yahoo.com
yes, canada results rock. Looks like they are messing with the results to give bad results to get $$$$ for payperclicks. Just set your search to canada.
MSN has just move up on my list for relevancy.
#1 ASK
#2 MSN
#3 Google
#4 Yahoo far behind after last update sunday.
Results look very funny in my industry.
PDF files from subpages rank better than the main page for a certain keyword. This is the case for most keywords (about 20) that I checked.
Yahoo Canada results are very relevant and close to Googles results.
Far too much importance has been placed on having keywords in the URl, resulting in spammy sites showing up on pages one and two. MSN suffers from the same shortcoming.
Google on the other hand has perfected the balance needed to bring relevant pages to page one and two.
Looking over it, I see pretty good results until you get into the high competition terms. Lots of spammy domain names seem to be ranking well and that was the recent downfall of relevancy in MSN.
My suggestion: Don’t give so much weight to keywords in the URL.
Can’t tell anything about your new algo because since the change my pages have been up and down, in and out, all over the place !
why are the results so much different between yahoo US and yahoo Canada..is that just a temporary thing (i.e) index out of sync
It has to be said, the Yahoo! search results have been getting increasingly poor the past couple of months.
On one of my sites - a major authority in its area (loads of links from .edus and .govs) from July 21st it only receives significant visitors from Yahoo! via image search.
Whatever Yahoo! seems to be attempting is not leading to search quality - I’m now more likely to find a dropshipper when searching for a product than a vendor.
Seems like Yahoo! keeps missing the chance to rival Google by shooting themselves in the foot when they can.