Yahoo Results showing Very Old and Current Information

[hiero]

Has anyone else experienced sites in Yahoo that show very old web page SERPS that no longer exist (some info hasn't been online for years). At the same time new web page SERPS are showing up. Doesn't Yahoo clean their index?

Some of the old SERPS that are being shown haven't been on the server for a considerable amount of time.

[strategicrankings]

I've noticed that Yahoo! takes very long before they either crawl a site or update their index. The issue that i usually face is that googlebot crawls a site very frequently , in some cases almost daily, and on Yahoo! we have to wait a lot before we can observe the performance on onpage optimization. Sometimes it can be very frustrating.

[Dodger]

Everything I am seeing leads me to believe that Yahoo does not have the resources to crawl the Internet and maintain their Index on the scale that Google is. Why that is, I do not know. They are probably not sinking enough money into it maybe -- it is a second-rate effort at best (IMO).

Stale results is the tip of the iceberg. That delay between a crawl and those pages actually showing up in the Index can be three or more weeks. I am still waiting on some that have not shown up for almost two months. That is the unsettling part -- and why those pages just do not automatically appear in the results is just plain weird.

[webcertain]

I've noticed a url in yahoo serp that has been offline for around 8 months.. Not sure it's just taking a long time to crawl and update, more something like old index being online while they're working on the current one..

[Dodger]

You make it sound like taking your car to the shop for a 3 month checkup, and they give you a $19.95 Rent-A-Dent to tool around town in for a few hours. :eek:

[KegWorks Rich]

I am having a problem with Yahoo! which has a bunch of my old URLs indexed. These pages no longer exist, they were from our test site, we never thought to write redirects because we figured no one would have gone there or bookmarked them.

The worst part is that Yahoo! has more of my old non-existent pages indexed than they do my current site. Any ideas?

[Dodger]

The worst part is that Yahoo! has more of my old non-existent pages indexed than they do my current site. Any ideas?

You are not alone on this. Yahoo's search index is retarded. :eek:

When Yahoo first rolled out on its own earlier this year, I was perplexed on how they filled their index with over 2 billion pages to begin with. At that time, the talk was "Where is Slurp?".

Now Slurp is everywhere and the talk is "Where are my pages?".

Last month I watched the Slurp spider crawl a total of 1196 pages. Out of all those pages, only 17 pages made it into the Index at Yahoo Search. Of those 17 pages, only one was a content page of any real value to me. This was just one site. Other sites I monitor are showing the same disparate results.

According to Yahoo's information (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-07.html) on inclusion into the index:

When Yahoo! Slurp crawls pages from your site, the pages are not instantly put into the Yahoo! search index. Once crawled, the documents will be considered for inclusion at the next database update. Pages that are indexed will be able to be seen at the conclusion of the update process.

This tells you what? It tells me that they are considering those pages, but how they consider them is a mystery to me.

Of the pages that are already in the Index and get updated, they crawl those also. But they do not appear to "reconsider" updates to those pages. If a page has already been considered inclusionary or worthy of their index ... how come it is getting crawled, but not updated?

Retarded? :confused:

[webcertain]

Of the pages that are already in the Index and get updated, they crawl those also. But they do not appear to "reconsider" updates to those pages. If a page has already been considered inclusionary or worthy of their index ... how come it is getting crawled, but not updated?

Retarded? :confused:
Some of the pages already in Yahoo index are permanently redirected (301) to a new site and still, only the old urls are in the index.. :mad:
But for one url it's even worst: www.domain.com/page is permanently redirected to www.domain.co.uk since last year. I've been using the cached version for this url and horror :eek: , the cache is the new page www.domain.co.uk..
www.domain.co.uk is in Yahoo's directory, and www.domain.com has never been, so no quick solution there :(

[Artyom]

Hi,
the same situation with the site I'm doing SEO for.

This is like couple minutes ago I was on #1 place on my main keyword 'adult trade show design' and now it's nowhere and then get back on top again. I assume this is somekind of Yahoo Dance or something;-) Or perhaps I come to different servers each time and their indexes are not the same.

I'm gonna keep checking it throughout the day to see if it's permanent situaation.

_________________
Artyom Diogtev

[AussieWebmaster]

It can take quite some time for them to flush the information out of the system... in the meantime be glad there is a presence and just use 301 redirects to make sure they end up where you really want them anyway.

[Elisabeth]

very interesting observations on freshness there.

anyone else notice yesterday the default # of SERPS went to Ten?

[Dodger]

anyone else notice yesterday the default # of SERPS went to Ten?

Nice find Elisabeth. Now isn't that just like them. After all, the sponsor results take over a screen and half worth of the results -- now they are defaulting to less organic results on the page. What is next? One per page? Might as well.

[Artyom]

The situation has changed, now I can see my old page version (before I made a title correction) and after that. It shows randomly...once it's old one, once it's new one.