Big changes in results today with some major shifting around.

I see the serps shifting back and forth betweeen the old and new.

i hope it's still shifting. i got a dmoz link that's been crawled and cataloged by yahoo and dropped from the first page to the third page for a nice three keyword phrase.

s.

one more thing - yahoo's linkdomain function is returning "unordered" results.

typically, that function would return IBLs in a "rank order" of pages with the highest PR (yahoo's version of PR, anyways).

perhaps, when the "linkdomain" has settled, current results will be more consistent with previous SERPs.

S.

So far I don't see much result but I can tell that they keep on screwing up my site and some others that I'm watching for NO obvious reason...and i start being knowledgeable about SEO...no black hat whatsoever and still even the cloaking pages that i have reported months ago are online and more or less well ranked.
I really wonder when they will decide to remove this bul**** of ranking my homepage like the least important page of my site while all other pages are doing very well....Apparently it is better to buy text links or use spam or cloaking pages with Yahoo. Terrible...not even able to build a spider, they better hire some IT students for next summer's internships and re-do the job for them from scratch.

Of course im mad at them but well ...I really have good reasons. Viva MSN and Google.

Thankfully, my newest website is on #2 from #5 last week. Also, I found that Yahoo indexes faster than google and indexes .net before .com domains.

something is seriously wrong with the new update. my site fell from a top 3 ranking to page 2.

this is seriously becoming a problem. i guess yahoo doesn't care about providing relevant results anymore.

does anyone know who i can contact in order to get this fixed?

I have had similar results.... listings that were top 5 fell to the 3rd and 4th pages....

I would not complain if it were a competitive issue, but the results that replaced my listings are nothing but keyword spam and re-directs.... it is disheartening to say the least....

Most listings are thrid level domains that spam keywords... a new process of doorways.... I keep 'assuming' that Yahoo is on top of the situation, but it's been ongoing for over a month now....

Sorry, I know it's serious but I can't resist

>>does anyone know who i can contact in order to get this fixed?

If it were Google I'd say contact a link broker, but that isn't the case with Yahoo search. If there's an algo change there really isn't anything that can be done except wait for the next one, or figure out what just changed and make adjustments for the site.

A site of mine also dropped from #3 to #20 with this recent change, but to be honest I couldn't figure out how it was #3 for that to begin with, being a fairly new site with virtually no links - in a fairly competitive space that's very seasonally hot right now.

Now the site has disappeared altogether when I look for it. What's peculiar though is that the traffic is still coming in from Yahoo for that search term all day long. So apparently others can see the site, though I can't.

I am wondering if this change is the reason we have seen such significant drops in traffic the past month. We went from having a record month in march of over 240,000 visitors and a daily average of 7630 visits per day. Then in April , we see our traffic drop to a daily average of 6170 with a major decline coming in the last half of the month. Now this month we are around 4400 per day. I have really never tracked our rankings in Yahoo as we do very well in Google, but I have started to check our rankings and I see that we are not ranking as well as I thought we should since we do so well in Google. At first I was concerrned that out design update was effecting it, but I dont see how since all we really changed was some fonts and the arrangement of the text. All I know is thay i am very perplexed at this point. Our traffic logs are really giving no insight for the traffic loss as they ar in line with what they normally are, just lower numbers.

I don't want to spend my time criticizing Yahoo, but really this engine becomes ridiculous :D

For those whose rankings fell for no obvious reason (and if they use no trick, no back hat..) they might want to try what I've found 1 week after the so-called major update (a joke) last month, just type site:www.example.com and see if your homepage ranks N1, if it does you are fine...just an algochange, if it does not: Yahoo screwed up your homepage so most of your important keywords with it.

On one of my other sites it was fixed with NO CHANGE on the site itself...Yahoo un-screwed its BS alone and it is back N1 out of more that 60 million results (no kidding but not very competitive somehow)

For the other site...nothing to do.....SCREWED up by their stupid spider that keeps try to find pages that do not exist for months, homepage ranks Number 123 out of 154 pages, even my RSS feeds rank better within the site -----Ridiculous.

Yahoo has a long history of screwing up good sites and when observing my industry I found a couple of competitors that have the same problem, and like me they use no trick, natural link popularity, relevant and nice content while the first page is just a bunch of spam and ridiculous sites with no maintenance and almost no backlinks for some of them (+ a cloaking page that even with the cache does not even have the right keywords on it....)

I'd be interested in other's result by trying the site:www.example.com :)
Let'x try to count the number of sites Yahoo screwed up.

Let's just educate people so they go to Google (not great either but far better) and MSN (better than yahoo on many points but still needs to improve)

When you think that it took more than 8 months (I think ) to Yahoo to understand that a 301 redirect is not a duplicate page I wonder how long it will take them to fix another stupid mistake in their algo!

There may have been an algo tweak... the same three keyword search i referred to above returns my site in the first half of the second page - about a one page improvement.

S.

I'm going to try adding some reverse backlinks, and see what that does. A few of the directories I was submitted to went offline, and since Yahoo seems to be basing its serps entirely on reverse link exchanges now, I have no choice.

I'm going to try adding some reverse backlinks, and see what that does. A few of the directories I was submitted to went offline, and since Yahoo seems to be basing its serps entirely on reverse link exchanges now, I have no choice.

Hey, what do you call reverse backlinks ?
:D

Looks like we have a newbie here guys :)

A reverse backlink is a backlink off the top rope.

Seriously though, I've also had past success with triangulated backlinking campaigns. I'll need to increase those too.

Looks like we have a newbie here guys :)

Looks like if I'm a newbie, I'm not alone: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-12%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=%22reverse+backlink%22&btnG=Search

However my point is that Yahoo never gave very good result, never gave very poor results either, always had troubles somehow indexing sites, does a human review of very competitive terms (I'm convinced !), always ****s up some good relevant sites for abscure reasons.

Just taking my exemple: why all my pages rank great while the most important page (homepage) is almost nowhere to be found on Yahoo.com and .ca ....WHEN all over the world it is well indexed....it's just ridiculous.

Until now I noticed stupid results with Yahoo but of course for the first time I have to suffer their poor work and I find it so ridiculous on this a so naturaly popular site (I almost not even exchange links..no need) that this engine lost all the rest of respect I had for it (there wasn't much left though anyway)

Me think...

>>Looks like we have a newbie here guys

Yah, me too. What's a reverse backlink?

>>A reverse backlink is a backlink off the top rope.

Still don't get it.

Hi guys!

I have just signed up after getting a not so nice welcome on another so-called friendly SE forum.

Anyway, I noticed that all of our (my employers) sites have taken a battering on Yahoo over the weekend. Now there may be more to this than just the Yahoo changes that others are experiencing because we are competing with Yahoo in a certain area. Does anyone know if they would knock us off just to help their own cause? When I say we have taken a battering I mean even typing the name of the website (without the .co.uk/.com) brings up nothing, whereas before we were doing really well.

Also, does anyone know how I can get my Avatar on here?

Many thanks

For those whose rankings fell for no obvious reason (and if they use no trick, no back hat..) they might want to try what I've found 1 week after the so-called major update (a joke) last month, just type site:www.example.com and see if your homepage ranks N1, if it does you are fine...just an algochange, if it does not: Yahoo screwed up your homepage so most of your important keywords with it.

My site that was around #13 and fell to #200+ is exhibiting the behavior noted above. My competitors have their home page come up as the first result with a "site:www.example.com" search. When I do the same search on my site, my home page comes up #59.

Does anyone have an inkling as to what is going on?

Hmmm... reverse backlink? Semantically, wouldn't that be sort of like a reciprocal link? Some clarification of this term would be appreciated. Are we talking some kind of triangular affiliate thing here? Oh well- :confused:

At any rate, where I work, we have recently experienced some weird fluctuations of rank in Yahoo. We are usually number one for several highly competitive terms- for a lot of these it looks like we dropped to number two, beat out by some previously unknown competitor whose only edge is a greater keyword density than us. As our linking is sound, (relevant, coming from a wide variety of PRs, more inbound than outbound, etcetera), I am convinced that there's something fundamentally unhealthy we are doing with our content.

Herein lies the paradox: we are currently conducting a site-wide audit to identify dangerous overoptimization across the board because common sense dictates it will ultimately hurt us unless we make some changes. At the same time, the major engines mess around with an algorithm or two and suddenly we're getting smoked by sites/pages that are waaaaaay spammier than we could ever be. Given that I am now in a position where I am creating hundreds or new pages of content for our site, I am concerned that my whole strategy at this point might be based on flawed assumptions.

This would seem to be the challenge for anyone who thinks that a balance can be reached between white hat/black hat SEO, especially in the more competitive areas of online marketing. Too spammy, and you get banned (and feel like taking a shower each time you get up from your computer). Not shady enough, and no-one can find you anywhere in the SERPs. My department needs to move away from some once-helpful techniques that are now considered spammy (don't blame me, it was like that when I got here). On the other hand, will our rank suffer in the short-term? Will we continually have to fiddle around with our content so we don't fall off the tightrope? My guess is yes to both, but I'm open to feedback.

As I can't really discuss our strategy (I would love to submit one of our sites to some sort of site clinic) with strangers on the internet, I guess there's not much I can do here. However, if anyone would like to supply me with guidelines on avoiding overoptimization or links to resources on the subject (if acceptable use guidelines permit, naturally), kindly drop me a PM.

experienced some weird fluctuations of rank in YahooJoin the club, so do plenty of others! I doubt it's the sites themselves lots of times, it could easily be what they're doing with the index.

Nice post Cowboy, glad to have you here with us at SEW. While you can do a search for "over-optimization penalty" or OOP - most of what's around is Google speculation, and Google optimization is *not* the same as optimizing for Yahoo.

Related to adding content, there is nothing wrong with adding content to a site that's of value to users. Just watch not so much the density but the number of occurrences of individual words and exact phrases on pages, and where they're placed on the pages. Also, keep the site navigation intuitive. Basically pages that have no-brainer simple, intuitive navigation for users is pretty good for Yahoo.

And speaking of wierd fluctuations, I just checked and there has been another giant-sized Yahoo! twitch.

My site that dropped from #3 to 2nd & 3rd page and then into oblivion is now back at #3 and has more rankings for more pages this morning. I'm off to check some other sites, but I'm not holding my breath that it'll stick.

A week or two ago when this thread started ALGO change..........

Last night Update.

We have had movement in all of our websites on Yahoo overnight. One up 62 spots. :)