From Yahoo! Search blog, Tim Mayer writes Second Weather Report: Yahoo! Launching New Search Index Tonight (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000120.html).

We will be making changes to the index tonight so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

Hopefully, it will resolve some of the major indexing issues many large sites have.

So is this just an update or could this have any negative ipmacts on currently ranked sites?

Does this mean an ALGO Change or just re-indexing the web?

Anywhere I can read more on this?

As well - anyone know the domain for the main GOOGLE AND MSN SEARCH BLOGS?

Cheers

CRITTER

>>Anywhere I can read more on this?

Not until after the fact, but I imagine there will be a whole lot of shaking going on, so stay tuned!

OK

i would think just a full indexing and minor changes, but as usual, if you do your SEO properly and with some vision, you should be fine and maybe even move up the ladder.

Are these the correct Google and MSN Search Blogs?

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/


Cheers

Critter

yes those are the correct blogs.

I have seen some recent indexing improvement on some sites, nothing major, but a start.

And isn't it a nice change to be told in advance when a new index is due! Thanks for saving webmasters everywhere a whole lot of otherwise unneccessay heartache Yahoo!

Knowing that there's an update going on greatly reduces the 'is it just my site' related panic...

Well I'll just go into the "it's not only my site" panic mode then

I'm not seeing any changes at all.

No changes from my end either!

Critter

I think its a farce.

To clarify, it looks like they improved the index. They didn't say anything about a new algorithm. Just improved index, which implies more sites in the big Yahoo Search database. I am not sure.... :confused:

I think its a farce.

LOL. Wouldn't that be a mean joke if it was.

Anyone seen any sites drop out of Yahoo because of the update last night? I am not seeing much movement for terms I tested, only sites getting dropped from top positions.

only sites getting dropped from top positionsWell, that happened several days ago on a few of my keywords for one site, and I've also seen fluctuations throughout the month.

I'm sure it was well-intentioned, but so far I haven't seen any evidence that there's been an updated index rolled out. IMHO there has not been an update yet.

I am seeing 60,000 more pages showing today on one site alone, inktomi had been going hell for leather over the last few days though

Well, maybe they rolled out a new index with more pages included, but there sure doesn't seem to have been any kind of algo change.

Hi Marcia,
Just to clarify we have been making changes gradually over the last few weeks and Monday night was the end of those changes. Things have settled down now. It wasn't a sudden overnight change if that is what you were expecting.
Since this notification thing is new it will be hard for us to judge what each webmaster thinks is significant enough for notification and every change has large impacts on some site and little to no impact on others.
Thanks,
Tim

Well, i don't know for sure, but the last 2 big updates were on januari 1st and april 1st this year, so, my guess is that the next big update will be on july 1st.. :)

Maybe this is just a pre_shuffle of some results in their index...

By the way, im new on here, just registered.. i am following discussions on here for a while and I follow some other forums, like the webmasterworld forums, but i must admit that a lot of crybabies are overthere just wining about losing positions instead of discussing the interesting stuff, how the maintain or regain your positions etc..

Tim,

Thanks for the clarification. You make a good point, even if the update is enough to affect 1% of sites indexed or ranked well in Yahoo, it's worth announcing.

I wouldn't have even noticed the Google Florida update the other year if the forums weren't going crazy over it because it did not change the rankings of my sites.

With Yahoo and MSN index changes this week (MSN being a larger change) it is reassuring to see that the relevancy field is not only becoming more leveled on one side, but more diverse on the other.

Now, how about getting rid of all of those .ws spammy search result sites in the Yahoo index . ;)

Hi Marcia,
Just to clarify we have been making changes gradually over the last few weeks and Monday night was the end of those changes. Things have settled down now. It wasn't a sudden overnight change if that is what you were expecting.
Since this notification thing is new it will be hard for us to judge what each webmaster thinks is significant enough for notification and every change has large impacts on some site and little to no impact on others.
Thanks,
Tim
Got to love the updates three of our biggest sites were swept out of the index because you took the tracking-coded page as the canonical url for each of them.

Tim, thanks for stopping by to clear things up for us and putting things to rest. I think people have become conditioned to think of updates as cataclysmic.

have been making changes gradually over the last few weeks and Monday night was the end of those changes. That's how it's been seeming, almost like there's a periodic "rolling update" that's very minor.

I had a section of pages drop about a week or so ago after being changed quite a bit - it's hard to know whether there's an update slipping in quietly or whether there's an ongoing dynamic reaction to changes on pages.

Anyway, it's nice to know that there still isn't a big "shaker" on its way.

Tim, thanks for stopping by to clear things up for us and putting things to rest. I think people have become conditioned to think of updates as cataclysmic.

That's how it's been seeming, almost like there's a periodic "rolling update" that's very minor.

I had a section of pages drop about a week or so ago after being changed quite a bit - it's hard to know whether there's an update slipping in quietly or whether there's an ongoing dynamic reaction to changes on pages.

Anyway, it's nice to know that there still isn't a big "shaker" on its way.
Putting things to rest?

Marcia everything is relative. The fact that this thread is so short is in itself an indication of relevancy.

From a personal perspective, Yahoo completely dropped a local community news / community service website that I run as a hobby. Its a really small county in Florida with less than 25k residents. The site is mambo and contains local news, high school sports, festivals, county governement info, announcements and information that county residents find valuable - Very clean with quite a few .edu and .gov backlinks.

It lost all Yahoo KW SERP rankings on 6/11 - including searches for the domain name (which is the same as the county). I'm talking about not in the first 1,000 positions. The indexed pages and backlinks are the same but no one can find it on Yahoo (BTW it ranks #1 in MSN and G for most kw phrases that contain its name).

I've been scouring the forums and there are a lot of webmasters that are perplexed about the Yahoo updates that have been taking place all month. This is more a point of pride for me since the site does not generate revenue but if what we are seeing now is the new and improved Yahoo then their #2 spot will be gone soon.

The fact that this thread is so short is in itself an indication of relevancy. It might be more indicative that most people really didn't notice anything earthshaking - which apparently isn't how the way it was done.

lost all Yahoo KW SERP rankings on 6/11 - including searches for the domain nameNow see, that was on the *11th* - not the update this weekend. Apparently it's been a process of modifications that's been rolled out, the way I understand it. And by the way, right around the 11th or so was when I lost rankings for the money words on one of my sites - which is also personal. I blogged about some changes on the 15th which is how I remember the timeframe.

I also completely lost a prime site of mine for the core keyword phrase that went from a LONG time at #1 for the homepage $ keyword to oblivion - with what looked like a penalty (impossible). Maybe coincidence, but I fixed a technical glitch with correcting a 301 mod_rewrite redirection for the homepage from non-www to www which had *stopped working* and it came right back.

The first thing to look at when rankings drop is not the search engine, but the site itself, to see if there's something that can be easily corrected causing the drop or disappearance.

For example, something like this could cause serious problems:

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=5133

COB today we saw some indexing changes across our network + competitors.
Some observations:

- A competitor increasing the size of their index almost 1000% to 1 million pages (now on par with G-indexed),
- One our sites which had dropped from 350k to 15k two weeks ago went up to 125k+ pages indexed
- Many more substantial changes in number of pages indexed, both increase/decreases
- Thus far, SERPs seem unchanged.. will investigate further tomorrow morning :)

Marcia, I'm honored that you went to the trouble of looking up my prior posts! (and before you can ask, yes the dup pages issues have all be fixed on my revenue generating sites thanks to the great advice from SEW forum members - they've done well over the last 6 months in G/Y/M - knock-on-wood ).

It might be more indicative that most people really didn't notice anything earthshaking - which apparently isn't how the way it was done.

Now see, that was on the *11th* - not the update this weekend. Apparently it's been a process of modifications that's been rolled out, the way I understand it. And by the way, right around the 11th or so was when I lost rankings for the money words on one of my sites - which is also personal. I blogged about some changes on the 15th which is how I remember the timeframe.

I also completely lost a prime site of mine for the core keyword phrase that went from a LONG time at #1 for the homepage $ keyword to oblivion - with what looked like a penalty (impossible). Maybe coincidence, but I fixed a technical glitch with correcting a 301 mod_rewrite redirection for the homepage from non-www to www which had *stopped working* and it came right back.

The first thing to look at when rankings drop is not the search engine, but the site itself, to see if there's something that can be easily corrected causing the drop or disappearance.

For example, something like this could cause serious problems:

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=5133

Not to be nit picky but . . . . The update has been going on for several weeks and according to TheotherTim Monday night was the end of it.

Just to clarify we have been making changes gradually over the last few weeks and Monday night was the end of those changes. Things have settled down now. It wasn't a sudden overnight change if that is what you were expecting.
<snip>

My comments on the relevancy was related to the general lack of discussion in this thread. There may not be much interest here at SEW on this topic but there is in other forums around net.

That's good advice to look internal instead of external when there are sudden changes. I'm glad you where able to resolve your technical 301 issues I hate to see anyone lose $$.

Actually I don't know if it's the same for you but since this afternoon I see again a new index ....same as lastest update couple of months ago one week after...and again I find the second one terrible compared to the first one.

Edit: when I say terrible it's because I think that the SERP is closer to Google on their "first wave" index as 6/23, today they probably applied some kind of filter and it does not look good at all, stupid websites with redundant occurences of kw and almost no backlinks are given better rankings than some major players on the market apparently.
May be Google and MSN are not perfect but they rank "authority sites" accordingly Yahoo should not have such weird ranking with some unknow businesses.

As for my own site it got well indexed last week, and today it's been screwed up with no reason again...I'm on top on Google and MSN....write new unique content all the time, do not exchange links but have nice link popularity, have an HTML validated code etc...I will just forget about Yahoo I guess.

Hey I was out of the directory for 3-4 weeks and previously was 5 and 7 for our main term... I rolled back a few days ago at 1 and 3..... and the same is true of a pile of lesser terms.