Yahoo Update April 1 - Big Changes?

[KevinSource]

Is anyone else seeing major changes in Yahoo! this morning? Yahoo! SERP's seem to be very similar to Google's.

Wonder whats going on?

[dannysullivan]

As a matter of fact, Yahoo's issued a weather report about the changes. See here: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000095.html

[Frank Kilkelly]

Well done Yahoo! Now we won't have consipracy theories a-go-go. At least until the next unannounced update

[Marcia]

This is actually a very exciting update for some, because this month represents the start of a whole new shopping season. Spring is here, with summer not far off and people are out shopping online.

It's really too early to tell much without doing more checking, but just looking at some of my own pages for now, what I've seen so far:

1. Yahoo is *very* good at picking out words from the context and putting them together into phrases with other words to make relevant phrases. It is *not* necessary to stuff pages with phrases repetitively for them to figure out what a page is about.

2. Of course I don't know at what point the data was used for this update, but they've got very fresh pages cached, some from the 25th and 29th of March as of now, so judging from just the pages I've looked at the index seems to be nicely fresh.

3. With a quick glance, the pages I've got that are stale aren't doing much worth noticing, but the ones that are being updated for the current season with some attention and fresh content have impoved in rankings and are getting very seasonally relevant traffic.

4. Yahoo shoppers, particularly in certain niches, know what they're looking for and some tend to search deep. On some unexpected pages that are really very minor overall there are some people coming in looking for very specific items down in the 20's. One just now (checking real-time) was #24 and another #28. Minor keyword phrases that Yahoo just knows how to put together and include in the SERPs, and specific enough to bring very targeted traffic that's likely to convert.

5. While I am seeing some scraper sites and a couple using iframes for the scraped content, it isn't much and overall, from what I've looked at so far - admittedly very limited, it's early yet - the index is for the most part fresh and relevant.

[Nacho]

Originally Posted by Frank Kilkelly

Well done Yahoo!

Yes, well done Yahoo! and well done Danny Sullivan.

Thank you Danny for making this happen for our industry!

[Nacho]

Too bad in this latest update one of my sites lost about 6,000 pages from the index.

Tim, was this a complete fresh new crawl or did you guys copy over any documents from the old to the new index? - Thanks!

seems like a definate improvement for some of the terms i have been keeping an eye on.

(dropped from number 1 to 19 for one phrase, but the pages that are above (excluding 1) deserve to be higher)

lots of new pages, looks good to me.

still some spammy pages in some of the industries im watching but *seems* to be handling spam a bit better than Google at the moment.

The heads up on the update is a great step forward, kudos to Yahoo!

Dazz

[I, Brian]

I'm still waiting for Yahoo! to finally discover one of my big reference sites, after just 6 months online and a few tens of thousands of backlinks later.

Until it even appears for it's own unique name, then I'm afraid Yahoo! search still looks like immature technology.

Even when Google's screwy, it's results are still stronger than Yahoo!

[seobook]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

I'm still waiting for Yahoo! to finally discover one of my big reference sites, after just 6 months online and a few tens of thousands of backlinks later.

Until it even appears for it's own unique name, then I'm afraid Yahoo! search still looks like immature technology.

Even when Google's screwy, it's results are still stronger than Yahoo!

could they have penalized the site for some reason?

not buying screwy Google results being better than average Yahoo! results.

I think Google has wider swings in relevancy because they focus more on penalizing SEO than Yahoo! does...as shown when for a while PayPal stopped ranking for its own name in Google.

[Nacho]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

I'm still waiting for Yahoo! to finally discover one of my big reference sites, after just 6 months online and a few tens of thousands of backlinks later.

Are you saying that in 6 months Yahoo! Slurp has not visited you at all? Not even once?

Or are you saying that, eventhough Slurp have visited you in multiple occations your pages continue to not being indexed?

These are two completely different things and would appreciate if you are more clear when you say "discover".

Kudos to Danny for suggesting it!

and

Big Kudos to Tim for implmenting it!

I like Yahoo results, I liked yahoo results when they were Inktomi results, I liked Yahoo results when they were google results and I like Yahoo results now that no one knows where they come from. Maybe the weather reports will help clear things up for me...

...yes I am trying to kiss some yahoo booty, anyone got a problem with it?

[I, Brian]

Yahoo! simply does not seem to recognise the domain. My own thinking is that slurp got fouled up in redirects a few months back, so I've taken the redirects off and figured on Yahoo! eventually getting around to noticing that. No response to Yahoo! search feedback.

You're possibly right Aaron - but, you know, it creates a bad impression.

[rustybrick]

Recently (past few months) I have seen a case or two of a domain name being considered "duplicate" even though the content was not the same and the html structure was totally different.

What I believe the cause was, in both cases, were that the client originally set up (lets say) 5 domain names that aliases the main one (not even a redirect). Then the client took one of the aliased domain names and made a new Web site on it. The other engines noticed and acted accordingly, but not Yahoo!

I have actually reported one such case to Yahoo! and the feedback was great. But not changes as of yet, its been about two weeks. I hope to see results in the next week or so.

[Nacho]

With another example, we have of a Yahoo! Store that had serious duplication issues. It's a long story, but to make it quick, we ended up with like multiple versions of our site because Slurp was programmed to crawl through the back door of Yahoo! Stores.

So, we set up 301 redirects and they were being treated correctly after Yahoo! Stores corrected the 301 problem some days back last October '04. However, we still had about 13 domains that were severly duplicated. Anyway, this last index update corrected that problem and now we have our own unique website in the worldwideweb. So, good job to Yahoo! Search for that one. Seems like they corrected the index by eliminating many duplicated documents.

The real question is, what do they consider "duplication"?

[Marcia]

Nacho, I didn't even realize Yahoo had any problem with this, I never caught or noticed it

store.yahoo.com
store.yahoo.net
site.yahoo.com
site.yahoo.net
stores.yahoo.com
your account name pre-appended to any of the above URLs
shop.store.yahoo.com or shop.stores.yahoo.com

But last year right after the Florida update Google had serious problems, with the subdomain and domain name turning up the same pages on the same results page showing the identical page, with stores being indented under other Yahoo stores owned by different proprietors.

I had sent in reports about it with several examples and stopped seeing the problem, but never realized other search engines had issues with it.

The real question is, what do they consider "duplication"?

I've got a couple of pages that I believe might have been hit as duplicates that have different enough text (not much, just a long paragraph) but structurally are too similar - with the same merchandise. I couldn't say for sure, but there's no other explanation for those pages dropping like they did.

[dannysullivan]

Thank you Danny for making this happen for our industry!

The thanks really go to the industry itself and then Yahoo for doing it. Back in June or so, we had that "what would you like" thread where I asked people what they wanted from search engines. Many people posted they wanted a weather report -- so individual voices can make a difference

[Pushe]

It was, I think, pretty good Y update. It seems that Y is now paying more attention on domain name and meta title - IMO. The other thing I've noticed that the indexed pages and the inbound links are now fewer.

Does anybody notice sth like that?

[KevinSource]

I actually see a whole lot more indexed pages...actually the most I have ever seen in Yahoo! and inbound links look fairly the same. But overall, I would agree that it is a pretty good update.

[Marcia]

>>actually see a whole lot more indexed pages...

And yet, there are people around reporting losing a lot of pages indexed from their sites.

[KevinSource]

And yet, there are people around reporting losing a lot of pages indexed from their sites

Initially there were fewer pages indexed (Friday morning,) but over the last few days the numbers keep increasing. Actually, I think the biggest jump was late Friday afternoon.