Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Great news! Of course for retailers I can imagine an update at this time of year may end up being a headache.

I realize that the update is still in progress, but I do see some issues. For example, one site that shows up in the Top 10 in a search for ‘Orlando real estate’ (the one with the .tv domain) shows only 2 indexed pages (one of them the stylesheet)and 39 backlinks. It’s also crammed with DIV’s that hide text.

I also see a lot of About.com sub domains and bizjournal.com pages showing up in the Top 10 on “city name + real estate” searches for many, many markets.

In most markets, local real estate schools are also showing top results on “city name” + “real estate” searches. Yes – it fits the literal search criteria. But is that what web surfers are looking for?

The same question could be asked for the About.com and BizJournal.com sites showing up near the top.

It appears that keywords in Backlinks – along with Bodytext keyword frequency are playing a major role in SERPs.

The overall result is slightly better relevance than the last update.

Looking at the heavily SEO’ed SERPs for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – tends to illustrate this the best:

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=?p=search+engine+optimization

The ca.search.yahoo.com is still showing better results.

I actually saw a PPC ad show up in the organic results, with the title {KeyWord

Is update done now or still going on? My site lost 80% of index pages and gone 2nd page to 8th page. I hope it is temp things and update is still going on.
Everythign going to be fine after update id over…..

Great, a new update, I see some changes, it looks like it’s a reroll from the past, same results that were up around 6 months ago. Also noticing that doorway pages are still not being ignored. Still waiting on a response from you on my sites Tim.

Hi Yahoo

I have tried to understand how you rank sites and am completely confused.

Our site is 100% spam free yet it appears that our site has a penalty against it as it does not even rank for its name. (Online Gambling Insider)

site

xhttp://www.online-gambling-insider.com

We have tried pretty much everything to so what Yahoo requires yet there is obviously something still wrong.

Any ideas would be welcome.

regards
Warren Aronson

I went from top 3 to 2nd & 3rd page for a ton of phrases Tim. From what I can see, portal sites & “pay to post” sites are controlling the first page now. I also see pages in the top 10 with no content of backlinks. This can’t be it Tim! How long does it take for everything to shake out? Thx for the report..keep em coming.

Tim,
When i searched for “child horse book” #9 ranked url says “child cook book”. Lots of repeated results from same domain / about.com urls. I hope all this problems solved ASAP.

Out of the last three, this has got to be the worst. A bunch of black-hat.

Once again the .ca results are fantastic, while the .co.uk results are dreadful, and the .com results are at best spammy. Surely it can’t have anything to do with Christmas that the only relevant results for users are in the “sponsored results”.

I mean – please, I beg you to explain to me the algo that would rank Google.com #16 for “online gambling”…Take me down that slippery slope…

“The ca.search.yahoo.com is still showing better results.”

not for me

This is by far the worst update I have seen. I am seeing sites with zero links and zero content ranking on th first page!! Is this it??

Yeah, good call on removing Google from your index, people were laughing at you left and right…

Some months ago I gave up using yahoo. I just can’t find relevant results anymore.

Perhaps the reason behind some of these sites ranking without any links/content is the following,

From Y’s Search Submit Pro,

“Get more control over your search marketing messages

Search Submit Pro lets you create titles and descriptions that are displayed as algorithmic search result listings. The program can automatically generate result listings that best match user queries. You can update the information frequently, independent of changes to your Web site.

Be sure your content gets included

Search Submit Pro lets you include Web pages that might otherwise be excluded from algorithmic search results*. Examples include sites that require cookies or session IDs, sites with Flash content and information stored in content management systems, or sites that aren’t well crawled because of Web site design. Search Submit Pro removes the guesswork and lets you decide which content should be included.”

So until this goes away…good luck on the organic rankings.

Tim,

Are you able to comment on what I am seeing in this thread – http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24226 ?
If you were to view the image attatchments, you can see that different titles are being pulled and for what it’s worth, I have no clue where you guys are pulling them from.

Any background info on what you’s are trying to do here would be most welcome.

Cheers