What is Wrong with Yahoo Search?

[bdnseo]

Guys,

I have been doing SEO for a little over a year now and I have been wondering what is up with the Yahoo Search Engine.

I am a member of a number of SEO forums and I can't find very many posts tackling the issue of why Yahoo! search results seem to at best, difficult to explain.

While I can consistently get sites to rank on Google, and MSN applying the common sense SEO techniques I have amassed to perform my work, I rarely get traffic from Yahoo.

I have paid to be in their directory but this has never amounted to an increase in organic search result traffic from Yahoo (or directory traffic really... and yes I used my preferred keywords as anchor text).

I am beginning to think their search algorithm is really broken and they aren't telling anyone.

I notice after every "Yahoo update" that people complain in the forums that their site has dropped out of the rankings for a couple of weeks with SPAM on the first page of results etc. and then over time the results return to "normal".

My thoughts are that when Yahoo runs their ranking updates they get a crappy result from their system and then send in their huge team of "human editors" to "correct the mistakes manually" which could help explain why the listings "return to normalcy" a few weeks after an update.

Google was started as a search engine... MSN created new crawler technology for their engine... Yahoo started as a directory and moved into search by buying their technology and tacked it on as another service from their portal.

If you ask me Yahoo search is just an excuse to serve up their PPC ads... and they have to have organic results to appear legit. I don't think they really care about the relevancy of their results as long as PPC dollars are flowing.

Any thoughts?

[promarkweb]

I think you've brought up some interesting points. I think no one can figure Yahoo out. It's a tough one.

I've been posting for weeks on here, asking these types of questions with absolutely no reply. I've posted on WPW and gotten some response, and these guys tell me "content, content, content". But that doesn't work.

For a page that I get a #1 result in google, with the correct page being listed as #1, I get a #7 and #10 listing on Yahoo, for old pages that tie to the search, but aren't the actual product page. Poor results to say the least.

Also, getting Yahoo to update my site within their index is a real bear. I make changes to tons of pages on my site on a daily basis, but none of those changes have been reflected by Yahoo for well over a month, where as, google seems to do a pretty good job of updating these listings.

If you've noticed, you can "improve" your results by paying for the Search Submit service that includes your site in 48 hours and then updates your site every 48 hours. But it is a pay per URL feature. And PPC after the page is listed. What I feel comes down to paid search results. Which offer no real value to the consumer using your site.

Also, when trying to submit a new domain to Yahoo, their form does not work. Overall, I've gotten quite frustrated by attempting to optimize for Yahoo, and get good listings in their engine without paying.

For example. Yesterday our site had 50 or so visitors from Google US. Not including other country domains for google, and 4 from Yahoo. Life is so good.

One final rant, Yahoo does not clean up their results and remove old / bad pages with any interest. I've tried 301 redirects, just deleting the pages and nothing. It's a ball.

I think that coming up with a "mastering yahoo" book would make millions if you can figure out how their search actually works.

[Brian M]

promarkweb is on the right track because Yahoo's Paid Inclusion customers tend to dominate the "natural" results, particularly for highly competitive search phrases (even though you may have natural spot #1 in other engines).

If there are 10 paying customers competing for page one of a particular SERP, you are not likely to get on page one unless you are also willing to pay. However, there is no guarantee that your page will be listed there even if it fits within Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion “Guidelines.”

Basically, you pay to play and hope for the best, or you look for other search phrases that are not as likely to have paying competitors. How you find those phrases is part of the “mystery” of dealing with Yahoo.

Brian M

[searcher]

Being a PPC customer of Overture/Yahoo's I can tell you they are not listing us in top 10. One time I quit the PPC in yahoo, and we fell of the edge of the world. We were in top 10 about a year ago and never paid for inclusion. Guess I am going to have to since I cannot find us in top 100! :confused:

[promarkweb]

PPC and Search Submit are two different functions within Yahoo. PPC = ad based marketing under the sponsored results. The Search Submit function is one that you pay to have your URL indexed and your cached page re-indexed every 48 hours.

If you visit searchmarketing.yahoo.com you'll see links for Sponsored Search and Search Submit, and they are two seperate sections of Yahoo.

One thing I have noticed is that since I stopped paying for Overture on the Yahoo site, we've went nowhere within their site. Basically falling off the face of the planet. We've reviewed the Search Submit, but if we got similar results to our Google performance right now, we'd be paying $22,000 a year plus to be included in the Search Submit program for all of our major URL's.

I sincerely think that Yahoo is focusing completely on the $$ and not on being a quality organic search engine. As I pointed out in another thread at WPW, a search for "Maryland Caterer" returns a #1 page with no relavent information on Yahoo, and a very relavent page on Google. Yahoo must be concerned more with funds, than quality and that will end up killing them in the long run.

Look at their fund raising outside of the search arena. If you want to listen to music with no commercials, you can pay for it, want to get access to 1,000,000 songs with no commercials, you can pay for it. Bigger email account storage, pay for it. Get faster indexing of your pages on our search, pay for it. I guess once you get to be the big boy, it's all about the money and nothing about true results.

[searcher]

Hi promarkweb ~

I am one of the wallflowers/lurkers and do not hang out here until I need help - usually after the fact or to see if it's happening to everyone like Jagger did. At any rate, yes I know they are Yahoo's PPC and Submission are two different scenarios(?sp)

Gosh - I got interupted, hope I am in the right thread...

If I am, the the guestions are basically why are we in top ten for Google & MSN, but not even in the top 100 on Yahoo. I fall into this category. But last I heard/read it was okay to have two different domains with same product IF they were not exact duplicates. With my sites, the only thing that is the same is the part number. However, there is a linkback for one site to the other. I'm thinking that did me in. Guess I'll have to remove that link, shut site down and use a 301 10 second delay to point to main site.

Any suggestions?
S

[promarkweb]

I hope I didn't come across mean in that last post. I'm in the same boat as you, now I've come onboard to a company and redid a site that now has a PR of 5 with google, and most of my pages aren't even listed in Yahoo.

I have a number of terms in top 10 with google, and msn, like you, and Yahoo I'm nowhere to be found.

My thought at this point though, is that Yahoo is moving towards a paid world. If you're not spending money with them, you're site is moving down the list. Or at least, that's my thought. Especially if you used to have an account and stopped spending money.

I'm going to run a little test with some pages that are not indexed by Yahoo, and see if 1, they get indexed and 2, how they rank. I think it will be interesting to see.

Regarding 301 redirects and all that fun stuff, Yahoo is not cleaning out their database of those either. I have a number of pages that i've pushed into the new design and they are still coming up in Yahoo's results. It's kinda ironic, I can get listings with pages that don't exist, but can't get listings with pages that do. What fun.

I'll post feedback on how the test is going, when I get some results over the next week or so.

[bdnseo]

Glad to know I am not alone in my problems with Yahoo. As an addendum to my post I wanted to indicate that I do have a Yahoo directory listing and it seems like the only terms I rank on page one for at yahoo are the keyphrases that can be derived from my title and description text (that yahoo decided to write and botch for me, gee thanks $299).

And not all of them.

I am not doing any PPC with Yahoo right now.

Ranking quite well on Google and MSN for competitive keywords and phrases, but nowhere on Yahoo.

I guess we'll try opening a PPC account with Overture to get Yahoo traffic, as I don't see any solutions to my conundrum at this point.

[promarkweb]

band, if you want to wait, I'll give some feedback on how listing in Overture works, if you want to save yourself some test money. Otherwise, shoot away, I'll load my shotgun too and see what happens.

[bdnseo]

ProMark,

Anything that can save me some "pay per click fraud" cash would be great. :)

[searcher]

And get Yahoo to list us all with a regular search at least similar to Google & MSN

[bdnseo]

Maybe whoever is moderating the Yahoo forums could chime in and let us know if there is any Yahoo specific ranking tips that I have missed. My personal opinion is that I have done my homework but the long and short of it is I want to rank on Yahoo and I need help.

Any moderators out there with some Yahoo experience? ;)

[dannysullivan]

Well, it's difficult to help you, as I've got no specifics. What's the site? What aren't you ranking for that you think you should, especially at Google and MSN?

You only need to go into any Google sandbox discussion to find people saying about Google the exact same thing you say about Yahoo -- that they rank well on Yahoo and MSN so why aren't they ranking well on Google, as they "ought" to.

The answer is simple. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves all use entirely different ranking algorithms. When we've had studies from time to time, they've found that for any particular search, you're lucky if even half the sites ranked tops at one search engine also show up at the other.

In short, each search engine has what I call a different "voice." If you're doing well on Google and MSN, then it's because you're matching what they like. Do well on Yahoo, and it could be that the changes you've made will knock you out of the others.

If you flip back to the pre-Google, pre-directory days of around 97-99, we lived in a time when people starting moving away from a "one size fits all" approach to search engines and instead trying to do a page per term per search engine. They'd tailor (and often cloak) a page they'd hope would rank well for "widgets" on Infoseek, then do a similar page they thought would please Lycos and so on.

What I always found amusing was when they carefully calculated page for Lycos ended up ranking instead on Infoseek and so on.

Anyway, I'm not trying to dismiss your particular issues with Yahoo. They can be as screwy as the other search engines. But the bigger point is that just because Google loves you, Yahoo isn't necessarily going to do the same -- an more than if different movie critics see the same flick, they all unite that it was great. They have different opinions, different voices.

Anyway, toss out some specifics, and as long as it's not against our no spam reporting rules, we'll have a better idea of what's going on.

[DaveN]

Yahoo Uk is broken at the moment, to much weighth on the co.uk tld and the clustering is bust..

try this term

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=sky+one+chat+room

if they fix it :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daven/87334396/ ;)

DaveN

[promarkweb]

Danny,

Thanks for chiming in on the discussion. I think the magical key we are getting here is actual response from Yahoo. I'll list the problems that I'm specifically having with them. I'm less concerned with rankings, than I am with simply getting links current, and new links added to their engine.

My domain is www.promarktech.com. We are a technology distributor based in the US. We carry approximately 40 manufacturers and hundreds of products from those manufacturers. Here are the issues I'm having with Yahoo.

1. I cannot get pages listed within their engine. If I try and use their Free Submit page, I get a timeout error in less than a second.

2. Once a page is listed, they are not updating their database to record changes in the site, including removal of old links, changes in the path to a file, or actual page updates with new information.

3. And this is way down on my list to worry about, is that their algorithm seems to be an interesting layout in and of its own. I'll continue using the same product search that I've discussed in other chats to explain my issue. If you search for Vidar Designer 18 on Yahoo, I have two pages that rank in the top ten. I come in at #7 and #10. Not too bad I guess. Here's the problem, the two pages that come up are my vendor store, which has a link to the scanner's product page. And my actual manufacturer page which is out there as well and has a link to the scanner. On the actual manufacturer page, it has the old url, and not the updated one, and the old page title and description.

My focus here, for this domain is how can I get my product pages into the site, and then let them work up in results from there. I don't care where they initially place. I just want to see that Yahoo is including them in the index, and that they are updating them on a fairly regular basis. The information they currently have is over 2 months old.

Any suggestions and tips would be greatly appreciated. I don't mind doing my work to get listed on the site, but I can't even get yahoo to accept a page submission, or update the right pages and paths.

Just more confused by how Yahoo is managing this process.

[promarkweb]

BDN and all who are watching this thread. I activated a couple of small ads today to see if listing a new link in a PPC ad on Yahoo will help get the page listed within the directory. Will let you know how it proceeds.

[searcher]

Please do keep us updated - It has not worked for me.

Seems Yahoo would prefer I paid for the PPC rather than to have our site show up in regular directory search. Our site dropped out off Yahoo's search directory when I canceled or paused the PPC ads. It has not appeared in a directory search since, even though I reinstated the PPC. ~Not even our home page~.

I find it interesting too that they actually called me and asked if their "professional team" could work up some keywords that would supposedly increase our ROI. They added about 20 keywords that I thought where way out in left field, but I let them try it. Several hundered dollars later (& no noticable increase in sales) I removed their 'Professional' keywords. Sales stayed the same, but I have not seen our site in a natural search since.

[seoapprentice]

I too have this issue, though maybe a possible different cause. For several years we were doing great in Yahoo!, we were also spending heavily in ppc. Pretty soon we noticed we had dropped completely off the map, besides our PPC. After trying all that we could and still no results we completely cancelled our PPCs.

This has been over 8 months ago now and we still have not been able to get anything re-indexed. The only other thing that we have found that may have done this is that early last year we changed from www.domain.com/category to category.domain.com. Would this have done the damage to our position? Or is it more likely that they thought we would spend less if we were naturally placing well so they nuked us?

I'm not too concerned with Yahoo these days as we are doing well without it, but it is very annoying.

[promarkweb]

My honest first opinion is that it won't work. I feel Yahoo is pushing so hard to be a financial success that they are going to end up in the "everything costs" market. If you don't pay, you aren't going to do jack with them. Which is very unfortunate. Only time will tell I guess. In the end, maybe they will realize this will hurt them, more than help them.

Because of their current behavior, and for the fact that google ranks ads, we've gone exclusively with Google for our advertising needs, and so far, it's been very nice for us.

Now as an interesting side note, and I should probably share this in an SEO format, but did anyone know that some major US corporations are going with dogpile.com for their searches?

Something I found to be quite interesting.

[DFul4d]

A site I optimized is performing pretty well on Google and MSN, but I can not get a single listing on Yahoo. The URL is www.vector-networks.com For one of the keyphrases, "pc inventory software", the site has a top 5 ranking on MSN and Google, but I get nothing on Yahoo. For other keyphrases like "desktop management" I still get nothing, even when I search on the company name and the keyphrase, (both of which are in the title tag). For some reason, the site is outranked by other sites for keyphrases and its own name. About a month ago, I found a site had duplicated all of the content of the Vector Networks site. I contacted the site and they took the content offline. I thought that this could have been the explanation because of a duplicate content issue, but I have not seen any improvement in the situation. Any suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[rlanin]

I am having a similar problem with Yahoo, on www.equipmentlocator.com. We rank very well on Google and MSN on a number of search phrases. But get nothing out of Yahoo. I am relatively new to SEO and have read and tried to follow all the guides for good results which has worked well with Google and MSN but not with Yahoo. I really don't know where to go from here as we get pretty good results on dogpile and ask. Seems we aren't the only ones having this problem. Any help would be appreciated.

[Brian M]

I see the same problem in every site mentioned in this thread that I just uncovered in one of my own sites, so I will share my solution with all of you:

Do not place anything (an image, flash file, etc.) in a subdirectory that is specifically disallowed in the "robots.txt" file and then display it on your web site.

This is just begging for trouble with every robot on the web: First, you say to the bots, "Come on in" and then you say, "But, you can't go in there."

So, you get incomplete crawling because the bots have to leave your site. You may see a lot of robot activity in your logs, but NO change in your rankings. Eventually, the bots may (or may NOT) find the file and display it in their respective caches. However, if you do NOT see a cache associated with your URL (especially in Yahoo), take a long look at your robots.txt file to be certain that you are not giving contradictory messages to the bots.

Some bots are "smarter" than others, and they each have the own "voice" as Danny succinctly pointed out, but why confuse any of them? If you need to use the robot.txt file to prevent indexing of secret files, then that is the proper way to use the robots.txt file. But, if you display a file on your site, you should let the robots finish their task by allowing them to crawl into whatever subdirectory contains the visible files in your site.

There may be other problems with the sites mentioned (with duplicate content, etc.) but this is a glaring example that jumps out at me because I just fixed this. Magically, Yahoo now shows a link to a cache of the page, which it hasn't in more than six months, and the page is suddenly moving up in the SERPs.

This is not a "penalty" that will be obvious to any engineer at any search engine, so do not expect a response from them if you inquire about penalties against your site. This is just one of the many ways that you can "trap" a robot and go nowhere in the SERPs for an unexplained reason.

I have seen several examples of this practice interfering with robot activity and stalling or stopping SERP movement, so if you need more help, please PM me and I will take a closer look at your site.

Brian M

[bdnseo]

Any thoughts on sites that do not have a robots.txt file at all?

[bdnseo]

Are you in the Yahoo! directory and / or using Overture PPC?

I agree with Promark's earlier assertion that Yahoo is going to a PAID only model... Yahoo's entire portal site is about making them money. Yes, it is a free market and Yahoo is free to operate as they choose, but don't try to "fool" me is all I ask...and I think their "free" organic search results are pulling a fast one on hard working webmasters.

Having said that I honestly believe that Yahoo just isn't being used for search as much as the market share reports I read say they are.

I have read anywhere from 30-35 percent market share for search traffic is coming from Yahoo.

Does anyone out there have a traffic profile that gives 30% or better total traffic from Yahoo? If so, could you post your website. That would put my theory to bed.

My sites typically get 5-15 percent of my search traffic from Yahoo. This has been the case for every site I have worked on.

[rlanin]

I will have the techs take a look at the robots file. In answer to Link Lord our site is in the Yahoo directory, and has been for years however as many of you know the description that Yahoo assigns to a site may or may not be very accurate. Our domain has been on the directory since 96 and has had many changes as our bussiness has evolved and we are stuck with the description Yahoo originally assigned to our domain. I have requested that they change the directory category and desription to reflect our bussiness today to no avail. We do not participate in any PPC or pay for listings programs and reallly have no plans to do so at this time. Thanks again for your input.

[promarkweb]

Okay, so we've been advertising a few pages within the Yahoo network over the last week, no success. No addition to their database of sites and pages.

However, I added approximately 25 pages to our site, added links to them on our homepage and google indexed them within 24 hours, and many of them rank top 3-5 for their specific keywords.

I'm at wits end with Yahoo, and don't know where to proceed when it comes to Yahoo.

Outside of paying for updated listings in their search submit program, I know of no other way to get them to update our site and the links into the site. Also, they have links to pages that have been dead for months if not years still listed in their results.

I hope that Yahoo starts hearing how unfortunate their service is and how people will stand up and notice that their content is only paid, and isn't true and worthwhile.

I won't nor will I recommend that any of my small business clients pay any funds to Yahoo for traffic.

In regards to percentage of traffic into our site, Google = 25%, Yahoo =1% at best. Even with a PPC program at Yahoo, their traffic is still negligeable to us.

I'll keep working with Google and I think we'll find that Google will start regaining market share, and the only reason that Yahoo will continue gettings searches is because of housewives, and teenagers using their email and content services.

Business users and those interested in serious needs of search will start ignoring Yahoo and I think their recent financial results show that this trend is starting.

[promarkweb]

As I came in this morning, I checked our robots.txt file, and the only directory that is blocked for the search engines, that leads to other pages is our images directory.

Outside of that, no content on our site is blocked by our robots.txt file.

Would this really block Yahoo from indexing the pages since the images on the page are the links into the product pages? Versus text?

That seems a bit odd to me.

Also, Yahoo has not removed some of the links that are listed under my robots.txt as dissallowed directories. Would this have kept them from finding out that the files are no longer there, and therefore kept the content I want removed from being removed?

Any insight into the robots.txt file and how I can tune the site through that would be great.

[Brian M]

Do not count on using robots.txt to remove URLs because "Disallow:" only stops a robot from looking at a page. Once a page is in a search engine's database, it will remain there until the SE decides to remove it. The cache of the page may never change because the robot can no longer read the page and update it. Eventually, the “snippet” description under the page title may be dropped, but the page will still be listed in the “site:” command and it will stay there for what seems like an eternity. In some cases, it may actually come back when the SE restores or merges an older database. Therefore, the “Disallow:” command in the robots.txt file is best used BEFORE you put a page or subdirectory in your site.

A quicker way to remove a page from the SE is to simply delete it so that any request for the page receives a 404 server header code (which is “Page Not Found”), but even this has no guaranteed time for removal from the SE’s database. Or, use a 301 redirect to the new page location. In either case, it is always much faster to let the robot in to decide for itself what has happened to the page, rather than stop the robot in its normal crawl process through your site (via the robots.txt file).

If you create a custom 404 page to provide helpful links for your visitors, the SE will index that custom 404 page and display it in the cache unless the server header for that custom page replies with a true 404 status.

And, if you use JavaScript for your navigation, the robots do not read this code and will rarely find new pages unless there is a text link somewhere on the web that they can follow to the page. That’s why a text link version of the site map is so important – it gives the robot a clear link path to quickly follow. Otherwise, you are relying on the robot to eventually update some other page on the Internet that has a text link to that new page.

I have worked for many years on sites that do not even have a robots.txt file, and other than a lot of 404 errors in the server logs from robots requesting the robots.txt file, it does no harm that I have ever noticed. It was only when I started working on a few sites that did have a robots.txt file that I saw odd things like crawl delays, un-indexed pages, or pages that would never go away in the “site:” command.

One more thing – if you put an image file in a disallowed directory, and then put that image on a page, you will delay the good robots from updating that page, while the “bad” bots will crawl merrily throughout your site. I discovered this when a client ran a three-week sweepstakes for a specific, limited market to measure the response. I tried to be clever by creating a hidden directory that was disallowed ahead of time by the robots.txt file, and put just a single image (that was in the disallowed directory) up on the site. The only thing that stopped was the updating of the cache by every major search engine for three weeks. The sweepstakes bots found the directory right away and listed it within days. When the sweepstakes was over, I removed the image and the search engine cache updates began to appear again the very next day.

Some robots are faster than others, and the good robots will eventually find their way in, but if you want quick results from any of the search engines, do not block the travel path of the robots in any way.

Brian M

[jadebox]

The answer is simple. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves all use entirely different ranking algorithms.

They're trying to solve the same problem, so the algorithms should be similar (or rather, the results of the algorithms should be similar). And, in general, the SERPs really aren't very different.

But sites seem to disappear from Yahoo's SERPs periodically while they remain at the top of the SERPs for the other search engines. I think it's evidence of a problem at Yahoo, not a difference in algorithms.

-- Roger

[jadebox]

Do not place anything (an image, flash file, etc.) in a subdirectory that is specifically disallowed in the "robots.txt" file and then display it on your web site.

This is just begging for trouble with every robot on the web: First, you say to the bots, "Come on in" and then you say, "But, you can't go in there."

I don't see that causing a problem. Search engines don't "see" a page like a visitor does. They read the text of the page, parse out links to other pages and resources, and store those links for later processing. The links to pages and other resources referenced in the current page won't be blocked by the robots.txt until the search engine tries to access them later.

--Roger

[Brian M]

Yahoo displays "0" in its cache for many home pages right now, so they are definitely having a problem that may be related to the discussion in this thread. In fact, I am currently unable to see cached pages for ANY site at the moment, so my question to readers is: When did you first notice this problem of not being indexed by Yahoo?

Brian M

[promarkweb]

Yahoo looks to be updating their index. I'm not sure yet, but it appears that way. Pages that I created only a couple of days ago are appearing in the index if I crawl for them through their site explorer.

They are still indexing a number of old pages, but thank goodness that they are updating the index. I have no idea of where our pages will land, but things are looking like changes are coming.

Regarding the cache histories, there is nothing for any of my pages. Even those that show file sizes, don't have anything connected to them.

Hopefully this means Yahoo is waking up to all the chatter on these forums regarding the issues people are seeing with their sites.

Lets all cross our fingers.

In looking at some other domains of ours, things are still a little screwed up, but it does seem like Yahoo is starting some indexing.

[Papadoc]

I agree... many updates today, but not so good in different categories I am looking at. Major players are dropping like flies and unknowns and garbage sites are coming to the surface.

On one search I did, the top site remains tops, but then the bottom falls out and instead of companies, there are like 5-6 online yellow page type directories intermixed with blog pages from crazy sources, some that don't even have the search terms in the title or H-tags. It's suddenly like a directory of directories mixed in with the who's who of riff-raff.

Other searches are showing up members.tripod pages in the top 10, beating out expert sites, and multiple sites have multiple pages in the top 20. It's like the old days of AltaVista when one company could dominate the search results.

[promarkweb]

I'm happy with the update to a degree, at least they've indexed about half of my pages, not so happy because they haven't even followed and indexed the core links on our site map and can't list that page becaue they can't find it. Even though there is a text link to it on every page on our site.

I have no idea what is going on with Yahoo. I'll be happy their starting to index stuff, will wait and see if we start coming up in results.

One step at a time?

[Papadoc]

Okay, so it's not that you are so happy with the update and the changes they've made. It's that you are happy that they are indexing a few of your pages now... the ol' "something is better than nothing" principle. Sounds more like a personal victory than a degree of satisfaction with the changes to the way they handle the index.

It is interesting the timing however, with Susan Decker's announcement that Yahoo capitulates to Google and is "very happy to maintain our market share." In other words, 'we are #2, we have no chance of doing better, and we just hope we don't go down.' Then they pull this update, evidently proving the "jinx" theory. Someone forgot to knock on wood! Probably mistook it for MSN knocking on their back door.

[BankCardCentral]

I have only seen a small flux in traffic today in my logs from Yahoo with ranks moving around a little in the results.

I don't know exactly what I have done to get into yahoo, but I hear all of these sites having issues with getting ranked in Yahoo and I am trying to get more traffic from Google and instead....

I get about 60 percent of searches came from Yahoo,., I don't mean to be complaining its just that I find better converting terms on Yahoo & MSN than google.

[searcher]

I've been monitoring everyones comments, but to date we are still invisible to Yahoo. Mostly unknown players and junk pages in our market. The few hits I've received are from PPC.

I still think that since we "PPC", Yahoo does not want us to drop the money income (for them) and that's why we just fell of the end of the earth in yahoo.

Very disappointed in Yahoo this past year. How does one go from top ten to "gone"? We're still top ten in G & MSN

[BankCardCentral]

How many of you guys have submited to the Yahoo Directory? $299

Is it worth it?

[critter]

How many of you guys have submited to the Yahoo Directory? $299

Is it worth it?

Good SEO, patience, top notch links and even better content and I can assure you will be included and ranked in Google.

I seo'd a site which targets keywords with more then 10 million competing sites, over 2 years ago and still hold TOP 3 positions on Google, Yahoo and MSN. I fully believe I have maintained this rank because I did not cut a single corner and carefully thought through and implemented my SEO strategy.

You can spend $300 in much better places these days (PR, Content etc..)

Cheers

Critter

[promarkweb]

Papadoc - at this point, I'm just excited that Yahoo is actually indexing pages. I've tried to use their "page submit" function and I get an error each time I try it. I get 20 visitors from Google to 1 from Yahoo, it's a huge difference.

I know that our site is written well, and that the content is relavent to the market and that we aren't spamming on people.

Most of our links are inside of our own domains, and that might be our only shortcoming.

I don't mind if Yahoo takes a little bit to index our site, but I would expect it do do the indexing on a complete basis. If you are going to visit the site, at least pull the site map, and index pages linked there.

Once you add them to your index, then rank them in a sensible nature. I've seen PDF files for a different product get better rankings in Yahoo for a keyword than the html page or pdf file for the actual product.

That's where I'm getting confused and frustrated with Yahoo. They index some pages, not all, and then there doesn't seem to be any rime or reason on how they choose to rank pages.

I guess over time, my pages will float to the top, but in the meantime, frustration is paramount in our boat. I've been banging around Yahoo sections in most of the major forums, only to get the same responses from a lot of people.

That response is that "No one knows what the heck Yahoo is doing."

After declaring that they "can't compete" with Google for #1, that concerns me on how much money and effort will be spent by the organization on their search results.

With some of the crazy listings making a 1,2 appearance on Yahoo, I don't know if I'm just wasting time concerning myself with this engine.

I would love to see a breakdown of m vs. f young vs. old on which engines they use. Anyone know of one?

[richard1234]

Just curious - our sites (www.construction.com) had decent referral traffic in 2004 and in 2005 numbers tanked and pages indexed by Yahoo were a fraction of what Google has index - in some cases 21,000 vs. 2.

Any ideas why or how to get Yahoo spiders to crawl and index a website.

[bdnseo]

Well Guys,

It seems like my post was aptly timed considering the recent comments from Yahoo....

Yahoo Gives Up (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256748_yahoo24.html)

quoting from the article:

"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."

What company is "happy" about being number 2??? LOL

My question is, how is this company making any money at all with this kind of attitude... oh, I already answered my own question earlier - PPC (or click fraud depending on your experiences) and their overpriced directory.

IMO Yahoo is going down, bigtime. They chase after what they think people want rather than concentrating on their core business and doing it well.

Can anyone tell me what Yahoo would call their "core business" right now?

It sure isn't search.

[searcher]

promarkweb

Have you noticed any results from your testing yahoo PPC? My cost has tripled in the last couple months. We may have been pushed off the ends of yahoo's world, but this PPC is getting out of hand.

searcher

[bdnseo]

I have been down the PPC road before with limited success to be truthful. If you have a membership based business or a product like a credit card where you can take a loss to get a "residual" customer PPC is great, if you are trying to make the one off sale... let's just say I've had a few "life altering" mistakes hoping to make something happen.

The Yahoo-Overture PPC model is a system set up so the highest bidder wins, and why not if people keep paying... but anyone who thinks marketing on the internet is the great equalizer will quickly learn that the big boys know what work and have money to spend to beat you in high dollar marketplaces.

Be innovative, be original and work on a product or service that people want. eg. Hotmail was a free email system that was bought for millions of dollars.

Let the engines and people find you as the buzz builds and then let affiliates pump their money into PPC for your product.

[bdnseo]

Ran a site command for www.construction.com and construction.com at Yahoo.

For site:www.construction.com I got a result of 2 pages but for site:construction.com I got a result of 125.


Looks like you are running a lot of subdomains for your services... this probably explains the results I am seeing, however I cannot explain why there are not more results for the site with www commmand.

Are you doing any mod rewrite stuff in your .htaccess file? I couldn't find a robots.txt file on your server so it looks like you are not blocking Yahoo's spider in that fashion.

Can you post your .htaccess file or explain how the pages of your site are built from db.

Also, looking at your web pages I saw this meta tag...

<meta NAME="robots" CONTENT="all">

you may want to try...

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

... although that really shouldn't make any difference at all.