Is Yahoo indexing Differently?

[TheRover]

My website has always held a good position in Yahoo under the search term: website designers

I had consistently been in the top 10 of results, as high as the #4 position which was fine by me, but last week it suddenly dropped to a mid to high teens position.

Is Yahoo going to the "we rank on how many sites link to you" and less on actual relevant content in a website?


I was also wondering if its just me or do others feel there is something inherently wrong with ranking a website based on inbound links? It seems to me it just creates a situation where ranking along those lines can create a high incidence of fraud to increase page rank.

[seobook]

Is Yahoo going to the "we rank on how many sites link to you" and less on actual relevant content in a website?

I was also wondering if its just me or do others feel there is something inherently wrong with ranking a website based on inbound links? It seems to me it just creates a situation where ranking along those lines can create a high incidence of fraud to increase page rank.

Effective SEO is all about extending the clients marketing message and products as best you can using the cheapest means possible without stepping on anybodys feet (if it were not then you would just use the pay per click ads and not worry about the organic listings).

Link building is not cheap. throwing one more optimized page on a site is. if I were a search engine I would primarily base relevancy of generic terms on linkage data.

In the context of calling "raising PR a fraud" then "all SEO is a fraud"

if you change the page copy to rank higher you are still "changing the page copy" "to rank higher"

why is it that people feel their own techniques are valuable and legitimate and that other common and effective techniques are fraud?

since quality link building is so expensive and time consuming it makes the paid ads look more appealing. that is the goal of search engines.

they want SEO to cost so much that people use the ads instead.

[TheRover]

Effective SEO is all about extending the clients marketing message and products as best you can using the cheapest means possible without stepping on anybodys feet (if it were not then you would just use the pay per click ads and not worry about the organic listings).

Link building is not cheap. throwing one more optimized page on a site is. if I were a search engine I would primarily base relevancy of generic terms on linkage data.

In the context of calling "raising PR a fraud" then "all SEO is a fraud"

if you change the page copy to rank higher you are still "changing the page copy" "to rank higher"

why is it that people feel their own techniques are valuable and legitimate and that other common and effective techniques are fraud?

since quality link building is so expensive and time consuming it makes the paid ads look more appealing. that is the goal of search engines.

they want SEO to cost so much that people use the ads instead.


Thanks for the lesson in business. I am guessing you misunderstand or are reading into my question beyond what is there.

I'll try again. If ranking a website high in a search engine is based solely on or 85+ percent on inbound links more so than on relevant content on the website, then writing simple copy and subscribing to one of the many "inbound link" websites is not to difficult to do as it seems its done quite often. I write this as I have noticed over the past year or so that when I use certain search engines beginning with a "G" that the content it returns has less relevancy than it used to. Which is why I made the comment that it creates a type of fraud in the results.

As an example in Yahoo, under the term: website designers some of the types of results returned on the first page are:

makingmoneylinks.marketingrebates.com/10/website-designers.html

www.websiteqa.com/websitedesigners

www.goldenwebawards.com/officialawardwinner.shtml

www.designersguild.com/


The above websites never used to appear in the first page results in Yahoo, but they do now.

The designersguild.com has 0 to do with website design and goldenwebawards.com (need I say more...I once submitted a website to them with one word on each page, nothing more and was awarded a Golden Web award for design excellence.)

It is returned results like the above that makes me feel that basing a major part of SEO on inbound links is going to eventually backfire.

[seobook]

Thanks for the lesson in business. I am guessing you misunderstand or are reading into my question beyond what is there.
no problem. seems as though you were complaining about the new relevancy algorithm and I was explaining why that algorithm makes sense from the search engine standpoint.

I'll try again. If ranking a website high in a search engine is based solely on or 85+ percent on inbound links more so than on relevant content on the website, then writing simple copy and subscribing to one of the many "inbound link" websites is not to difficult to do as it seems its done quite often. I write this as I have noticed over the past year or so that when I use certain search engines beginning with a "G" that the content it returns has less relevancy than it used to. Which is why I made the comment that it creates a type of fraud in the results.
Each time a person sells links they are selling off a certain amount of trust. Its much more expensive to build links into sites that fraud people than sites that do not.

It is returned results like the above that makes me feel that basing a major part of SEO on inbound links is going to eventually backfire.
There will always be examples of bad relevancy. Thats why search engines continually work on their relevancy algorithms and try to use as much human related feedback (linkage data) as possible.

[TheRover]

There will always be examples of bad relevancy. Thats why search engines continually work on their relevancy algorithms and try to use as much human related feedback (linkage data) as possible.

I understand what you mean by examples of bad relevancy, and I understand that it will happen.

But if search engines are relying on linkage data as the major aspect of relevancy, that seems that it in a way has a high probability to create false positives (for lack of a better term). The linking relevancy algorithm just seems to be a short sighted way to for search engines to index and profit.

Perhaps I'm approaching this wrong, but as I understand it, the amount of inbound links I have from websites that have to do with website designers will increase my ranking? Or is it just a total amount of links regardless of what the content is on those websites?

I'm probably beating a dead horse here I know, but hey, I gotta start somewhere.

[seobook]

if search engines are relying on linkage data as the major aspect of relevancy, that seems that it in a way has a high probability to create false positives (for lack of a better term). The linking relevancy algorithm just seems to be a short sighted way to for search engines to index and profit.
most of the web naturally self organizes fairly well. its just a big social network. as a percentage of the whole web the # of people who are actively gaming search engines is extremely small.

look at it this way. if the links were not so important I could make an endless stream of pages with virtually no purpose and still rank well.

sure some powerful sites will abuse their positions in the web, but that small number is much smaller than the # of people who are willing to write a bunch more random keyword rich text on their pages.


Perhaps I'm approaching this wrong, but as I understand it, the amount of inbound links I have from websites that have to do with website designers will increase my ranking? Or is it just a total amount of links regardless of what the content is on those websites?

I'm probably beating a dead horse here I know, but hey, I gotta start somewhere.[/QUOTE]

[sugarrae]

"Is Yahoo going to the "we rank on how many sites link to you" and less on actual relevant content in a website?"

That's been an aspect of their algo since it was launched. How much of an aspect only Yahoo knows 100%.

"It seems to me it just creates a situation where ranking along those lines can create a high incidence of fraud to increase page rank."

Yahoo doesn't use page rank - that's a google commodity ;). Yahoo does utilize link popularity though. Yep, very easy to abuse your link popularity, but harder than abusing on page optimization methods.

I understand your feelings that results could be easily manipulated, but honestly, I don't think there is an algo that can be put into place where the results are *not* manipulated. Some people are very, very determined ;). They can change the rules, but the dedicated will always be able to play the game.

"Perhaps I'm approaching this wrong, but as I understand it, the amount of inbound links I have from websites that have to do with website designers will increase my ranking? Or is it just a total amount of links regardless of what the content is on those websites?"

Actually, it's more about the anchor text of those inbound links. I don't see Yahoo being as picky about the source of the inbounds as Google is, but they do seem to have some, albeit low, standards. Just my observations anyway ;).

[KegWorks Rich]

I am having difficulty finding any evidence that they are indexing at all, unless you are paying them with Site Match.

I have seen Slurp hit my site almost everyday yet they have not made any changes to pages they have indexed.

The only pages that are being indexed and changed are the select few I am using Site Match for. The rest show no result of change, no new pages added, and as a matter of fact they have more pages indexed that are no longer in existance then they do current pages.

Anyone else noticing this?

[Mofo]

I have also found that many of my seo efforts have gone to the crapper....

Up untill a few weeks ago, I had many top serp listings for all my relevant keywords (in MSN and Yahoo), and now I got nothin....

I guess I have start writing more content :( - yippy skippy

MOFO

[rxs356]

KegWorks Rich-

We are having the exact same problem...so we moved those old pages to our robots.txt file, and Slurp is still visiting everyday, and STILL no changes! No new pages showing up, no ranks changing, NADA.

Any other suggestions would be most appreciated.

[qcguide]

I am having difficulty finding any evidence that they are indexing at all, unless you are paying them with Site Match.

I have seen Slurp hit my site almost everyday yet they have not made any changes to pages they have indexed.

The only pages that are being indexed and changed are the select few I am using Site Match for. The rest show no result of change, no new pages added, and as a matter of fact they have more pages indexed that are no longer in existance then they do current pages.

Anyone else noticing this?
I've noticed that they are slow to index new pages. I've been keeping an eye on the logs of a test site. (a personal site I can afford to get penalized.) A page they first spidered in August has just recently started showing up.

- Mike T.

[Thomas P]

Hello,

I guess we have the same problem as TheRover.

We were on the first positions regarding our main topic, now we are on page xx...

Other new and mostly unknown pages are on the first pages now.

What happened?

Is this this new algorythm or are we "banned"?
Is there any primer regarding this new algorythm?

Sorry for jumping in...

Thanks,
-Tom

[Marcia]

Thomas, if you were banned you'd be out of the index with no mercy shown. A drop down of a couple of pages is normal for search engines when there are changes. It just means something's changed, so it's back to the drawing board time.
Is Yahoo going to the "we rank on how many sites link to you" and less on actual relevant content in a website?Some people think so but it's not at all that way, from what I've been seeing and experiencing. Nothing of mine has budged more than a spot or two one way or the other and frankly I've seen others also stay about the same.

I was also wondering if its just me or do others feel there is something inherently wrong with ranking a website based on inbound links? Wrong if it were totally based on inbound links, and more than likely too easy to game if inbound links (and anchor text) are weighted too much. Inbound links should count; not exclusively, but as one of the factors.

Right now Yahoo seems to me something like Google did a couple of years ago, with possibly less emphasis on links than Google did. Back then with Google a site with a basic number of half-way decent inbound links could easily out-rank sites with multiple times the number of links for moderately competitive searches if the pages were optimiized.

I've always felt that for Inktomi you optimize pages and for Google you optimize sites (including and especially links - internal and inbound), and I haven't experienced anything different with Yahoo Search since the switchover.

Granted that links are needed, that's a given - they always will be. But with Yahoo it still seems more like on-page, plus to a degree site-wide factors because of how the linking structure affects and interacts with some of the on-page elements.

Yahoo's kind of like good old Inktomi, basic SEO 101 with some link pop and anchor text thrown in for good measure - but not to an excessive degree, which I like a *lot* because I don't much care for chasing after links at_all.

For example, for one search with about 2 million pages returned, the primary 2-word keyword phrase for a very targeted, highly attractive consumer market:

1 - 54 backlinks (only around 10 IBL from external sites)
2 - 233 backlinks
3 - 61 backlinks
4 - 163 backlinks
5 - 312 backlinks

For another search with a couple of million, not awfully competitive by numbers or Overture but very sought after by those pursuing it, mostly all SEO types:

1 - 400 + backlinks
2 - 5,000 + backlinks -

and on down the top ten, many many backlinks.

The problem is that people were so Google_centric and focused on only linking and PR for so long that plain vanilla on-page optimiization basics were neglected by many. Now that that's changed with Yahoo Search on the scene, it's almost like it's time for a revival and a refresher course for a lot of folks - especially for the newer people who weren't around in the good old days before the time of the total Google domination years.

[Nick W]

vaguely on topic:
I've seen a whole bunch of threads over the past few days about sudden swings in the Y! index. Very reminicent of the old google dances.

The most interesting comment i saw was by a chap that said that maybe this was all a marketing ploy on Y!'s part.

Think about it: Get webmasters all hot and bothered once a month, get people looking to be the first one to spot a "dance" each month and hey presto! Instant renewed/increased interest in Y!

Not neccessarily agreeing with it, but it'd be a damn smart move on Y!'s part to shake up the index once a month eh?

Nick

[creativecraig]

Is Yahoo going to the "we rank on how many sites link to you" and less on actual relevant content in a website?

I can only talk from the experience of my own sites, but from what I see Yahoo are weighing on page copy higher than inbound links and I to have read many threads in other forums backing this up.

Actual page copy seems to be a very high factor for yahoo! at the moment.

[Marcia]

>>once a month

Nick, it would be exciting, that's for sure - but so far not too many have shared an awful lot about Yahoo ranking criteria. On the other hand, PR is a topic that's always gotten a lot of attention, even if a lot has been speculative.

Once a month is about what it seems now but it doesn't seem to attract as much attention. Maybe it was actually the toolbar PR update that got people so wired.

I'm not so sure I'd enjoy hundreds of "scorekeeping" and me too posts, though you're right - it could be a smart move for Yahoo to come up with some kind of gimmick to create a cult following like Google has had.

[strategicrankings]

I can only talk from the experience of my own sites, but from what I see Yahoo are weighing on page copy higher than inbound links and I to have read many threads in other forums backing this up.

Actual page copy seems to be a very high factor for yahoo! at the moment.

Agree 1000%. From my actual experience too with quite a bunch of my clients sites, this is the same situation we are seeing more often.

I've been able to rank extremely competitive terms in Yahoo! (and MSN) just with on page copy. The same sites were no where to been found in G. eg 'application development' 33million+ results on Yahoo! took 4 months to rank in top 30 based solely on on page copy. 'outsourcing services' +6,8million results same time frame, 'software application development' +17million results on Yahoo! same time frame.

I'm actually optimizing another less competitive kw set site (+1,1million results - eg 'mortgage website development'), just took around 6-8 weeks to reach top 2 on Yahoo!. again only on page copy.

The client was so happy to pause its overture campaign.

PS: no black hat stuff, just ethical practice.

[Marcia]

I'm experiencing constant crawling and very frequent updating on a few sites - ones that I watch *very* closely. There may be something different going on between sites that have or haven't done Site Match.

For those who have, did you submit your main index page to Site Match, or just interior pages of the site?

[DaveN]

Remember : Yahoo are constantly tweaking the serps, sometimes 10 times a day sites drop out and come back all the time, sites move up and down, when they are happy i think we will stop seeing the flux so much !

DaveN

[sebastian]

Right now Yahoo seems to me something like Google did a couple of years ago, with possibly less emphasis on links than Google did. Back then with Google a site with a basic number of half-way decent inbound links could easily out-rank sites with multiple times the number of links for moderately competitive searches if the pages were optimiized.

according to my yahoo/overture rep for the 'paid inclusion' program, yahoo is changing this approach and moving to add more weight to link relevancy ...all the while putting vertical human editors in place to "clean up" various industries where spam is being reported and/or obviously running rampant.

since yahoo introduced 'paid inclusion' as a method of being spidered often, but not as a guarantee of placement, it has become in their best interest to "get the crap out" so that results for paid inclusion clients are improved.

personally, i like paid inclusion a lot and think that all engines should demand it. sure, they could have a "shoot in the dark" index like they do now, but as a user and advertiser, i would rather have a cleaner index made up of only paid inclusion listings ...why?

1) paid inclusion participation requires human editors review your site and, while working directly with the site owners, spends quality time creating the right copy feeds. this improves results for engine users (i.e. searchers)

2) paid inclusion prohibits the shady, back-room guy from being successful at creating doorway pages and junk content simply to muck up rankings.

3) paid inclusion shows a fiscal dedication to creating top quality content and relevancy for searching population

to me, google or yahoo or anyone have 8 billion pages means absolutely nothing when 7 billion of the pages are database-generated spam pages and domain name pages bought solely to provide 150 links to other pages with similar junk linking.

i agree with the poster who thinks heavy inbound links could backfire. i think it's backfiring already. the inbound link weights should be judged on the quality iof the site linking. i know google for one makes this well known that they do judge the weight of the inbound link ...however, i call BS on that because i see sites that only have "weak site" links, but thousands of 'em, and they rank well.

[seobook]

but as a user and advertiser, i would rather have a cleaner index made up of only paid inclusion listings ...why?

1) paid inclusion participation requires human editors review your site and, while working directly with the site owners, spends quality time creating the right copy feeds. this improves results for engine users (i.e. searchers)

2) paid inclusion prohibits the shady, back-room guy from being successful at creating doorway pages and junk content simply to muck up rankings.

3) paid inclusion shows a fiscal dedication to creating top quality content and relevancy for searching population
1) most sites can not afford the paid inclusion business model. if people want ads then the PPC ads are right there. there needs to be some solid base of information to make people want to come back. How many newspapers make a name for themselves and garner great distribution for their advertorials.
2.) I have also seen some junk lead generation sites which are evidently quality since they joined a paid inclusion program. The same thing happens with many "top quality" directories too. The concept of quality changes when you get paid to say that it is ok.
3.) they need to work even harder to have a quality index if they are only selling ads near it.

[sebastian]

a little misunderstanding...

i am all for PPC "ads" as "ride-alongs" to listings. (as they are now)

...and FYI, paid inclusion is much less expensive (at least at yahoo) than any PPC campaign i'm involved with (google, overture, findwhat and kanoodle) ...except for business.com

my comment regarding "all" should be paid inclusion was referring to engines themselves, with "free listings" also available as a separate index completely. in other words, there should be some criteria in place to "qualify" for engine inclusion as the current way obviously doesn't work very well.

but then i see the problems with people being accepted on one content level and then switching ...or implementing cloaking somewhere along the way...

i dunno. ...but what i do know is that something is wrong when just about every search turns up more "seo'd" pages with limited content than really good pages chock full o' content.

you actually have to weed through a lot of junk to get to good content.

example: in my home, i am trying to find better ventilation options for our bathrooms. when i search for "removing bathroom mold", the first few results are pages that have a ridiculous number of links all relating to mold in some way shape or form utilizing all kinds of crafty "rewording" to say the same thing differently and thus link to the same sites with different anchor text.

there is no content, or very limited content and the links all seem to be 'networked' as they simply take me to other, similar looking pages with the same strategy.

{sorry about the gnarly mold example}

obviously it works for them as most people can't tell and SEO page from a real content page and thus, start clicking away. this does not even mention the pop-ups, trojans and various scripts that tend to live and breed within these SEO'd pages.

if something doesn't improve, search will be in chaos and become less and less effective. IMHO.

[seomike]

Just some FYI for you mod rewriters. Yahoo has been dropping the trailing / on directory names as they crawl through sites. so a folder named www.domain.com/site/ will send users to www.domain.com/site with out a /. This could cause a ton of 404 and redirect users all over the place. Your site that is nice and white may come off looking like a cloak. so make sure that your rewrite rules are catching this programming stupidity by Y.

# here is a sample that will nab a directory without a trailing /
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ /somefile.php?var=$1 [L]

This rule is very greedy so make sure your rewrite conditions will keep it from rewritting legitamate directories like /images/ etc...

[seobook]

>there is no content, or very limited content and the links all seem to be 'networked' as they simply take me to other, similar looking pages with the same strategy.

but paid inclusion which charges on a per click basis is not going to make that any better. most paid inclusion sites are focused on conversion, not on giving free in depth how to information.

google is trying to index books and then split ad revenue with the book authors / publishers. if you get a ton of tech manuals (or a few Bob Villa collections) then it would help a ton.

the biggest problem is that the publishing industry needs flipped over. just like the problems with the RIAA it is rather apparent that it is going to take time

[sebastian]

yes seobook. good point.

however, to even be included in the pay-per-click component of yahoo, one must endure a level of scrutiny.

if you have clients, or are yourself, in this program you experienced the reps doing background company checks, and the feed partners pouring over your content to make sure any information sent to them for inclusion does in fact exist and in a proper, acceptable manner.

many of these junk pages would never pass this test...

[seobook]

many of these junk pages would never pass this test...
the junk pages would exist no matter what.

the biggest thing search is lacking is quality content. AdSense was intended to help fix that, but with all the sketchy AdSense sites that seems to be backfiring too.

I think I recently read that Google is losing money on AdSense ads with some of their partner sites (I think someone said that maybe these were CPM deals)...IMHO they should start paying a few book publishers well in excess of the value of their content to get the ball rolling and to get that content indexed and showing in search results.

if AdSense can bring in 25-50 cents a click and many books sell for $5-10 you really do not need that many pageviews to make bank. the problem is that over time one way or another (lulu, or amazon, or google) many book publishers are going to get marginalized...its the same reason that big media says how bad bloggers are. they see their own fate and are not motivated to change. some of the first ones that do will make bank though.