YAHOO - WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE DID YOU GO?

[greeneagle]

IMO - YAHOO seems to have made a major miscalculation in their most recent alg exchange with GOOGLE.

We had 2 or 3 Sites where YAHOO delivered good relevant serious traffic, beating GOOGLE "Hands Down" in all "Relative Respects", not for months, but years ---- well established.

They all fell off the map! Even, GOOGLE Images is leading on one of them now and it isn’t even an “image based site” What the hell happened to YAHOO in this last alg update?

IMO - This is absolutely the worst competitive screw-up I have seen by any SE trying to distinguish themselves in the algs!

I believe this is more serious than many think!

By the way, GOOGLE constantly updates their “Webmaster Pages”... Is this new?:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html


“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."

I just don’t remember them posting a recommendation that webmasters also list in a major rival directory. Do they use that public information (Yahoo Directory) also now?

What’s going on here? - These are; major changes addressed inadequately!

Everyone I talk to are reporting major drops in YAHOO!

Did they fold up and die?

Did anyone come out ahead, if so I haven't seen it professed publicly?

What happened here?

Ken

[DMC_34]

I agree the Yahoo SERP's look pretty bad right now.

One of sites lost our #1 to an advertiser which has our ad on their home page but doesnt directly deal in the keyword at all.

MY other listings fell out of the top 10 on another site. After reviewing the some of the sites which have past us I found:

A baby gift basket place #4 for holiday gift baskets.
A slew of Adsense sites with only a index page and link directory. For instance the #4 for gift baskets is www.thegiftcarton.com an made for adsense site.

I have never understood Yahoo much to begin with but it seems their results are pretty bad right now. There never seems to be a rhyme or reason for how they rank sites. People say content but my site has a ton of it, both do actually. Honestly I believe Yahoo has been going downhil for awhile. MSN will overtake them soon.

DMC

[DMC_34]

This Yahoo forum gets as much traffic as my site does from Yahoo.

Maybe we need to post this in Google forum.

DMC

[freehits]

You can not imagine the mess yahoo made of our established #1 rankings. From #1 for every possible term in yahoo for 6 months to dropping completely off the map on dozens of sites.

While in the place of this is yet more hyphenated scrape and dump sites. I know incredihelp said he too felt this recent mess on some keywords as well.

This is currently the ugliest I have ever seen the yahoo serps. The biggest upwaord movement seems to have been for guestbook pages and similar garbage.

The best move for them would be to put the knob back to "relevent", now that the "we have more pages BS" is over with.

[DMC_34]

I know some were not affected badly by this last update but honeslty I am amazed Yahoo has kept this latest alg in place as long as it has. Looks like crap to me.

DMC

[freehits]

Our major lost yahoo keyphrase was "rent to own" - #2 of 16,000,000 for what can be very lucrative phrase.

At last check, none of the google top 20 are listed in the yahoo top 20.

This keyphrase rent to own went from 16,000,000 to 60,000,000 results on yahoo.

In an effort to get press by having the most pages, they have doubled only the garbage in the top 20.

[s_clay]

The only change I see is the number of results returned for a query.

My rankings remain unchanged, 1st page, #4 to #1 for some competive (8 million plus) terms.

I do see some new sites, some junk, crowding me.

[freehits]

its been a crapshoot, while many have taken a dive, some more "gray" sites have not moved at all or moved little. There seems to be no quality related pattern to the eratic changes.

[uli]

Hi,
About 2 weeks ago the following happened:
My site went from position 4 on page 1 to position 51 over night and doesn't seem to come back up.

[loverboy]

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/index.php I Have GAVE THEM MY MONEY FOR Search Marketing It been Almost 3 Weeks Still No Email , Called 10 times No Reply. "Has Anybody Had The Same happen" , I losing money Waiting for Them to Do AnyThing .There Ad On There main Page Must Be Nice To Take Money from Somebody And Never Even Reply . Looks Like A Case Of If your Rich We Will Help But If your Poor We Will Take Never Again

[greeneagle]

loverboy,

You are kinda cryptic there. Can you provide more history and what the expense was?

Did you go thru here?:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/bizex/

I have had 2 clients opt to list in the YAHOO Business Express Directory without problems, while enternaining SERP benefits there!

Ken

[wrmineo]

... By the way, GOOGLE constantly updates their “Webmaster Pages”... Is this new?:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html


“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."

I just don’t remember them posting a recommendation that webmasters also list in a major rival directory. Do they use that public information (Yahoo Directory) also now? ... Ken

That statement has been on there for at least a year or better. They've recommended getting listed at DMOZ and Yahoo for sometime ... I just don't bother with the expense of Yahoo! directory. Personally, I think the fact that they "recommend" the Y! Directory shows they're confident in their own shoes so to speak and in fact acts value to their own credibility ... who's afraid of ... not Google.

[loverboy]

greeneagle
was rip off for $100.00 ok I thinking Of going To The FTC

[loverboy]

Yahoo! Launches Marketing Alliances Programis A big Rip Off still no reply from them,Been 4 weeks now

[incrediblehelp]

Greeny,

I had a client drop off from this last Yahoo update. My knee jerk reaction was to blame Yahoo for poor results, but after some further digging on the client website we found some old SEO tatics that could have been the reason for the drop in Yahoo. We also found major text and image duplication issues on some other domains that they owned.

Is it possible that your clients could be having similar issues?

[SEOforGoogle]

sorry to hear about your troubles, fellow posters, but for all clients, Yahoo has been great for us.

[wednesday]

The issue that bothers me here are the human edited results. Once a keyword gets some real traffic and voala you have the same 10 well known brands settled there. And your site #11. I've lost some very cool keywords. This way Yhaoo SERPS looks just like their directory. Nice.

[brian.mark]

The issue that bothers me here are the human edited results. Once a keyword gets some real traffic and voala you have the same 10 well known brands settled there. And your site #11. I've lost some very cool keywords. This way Yhaoo SERPS looks just like their directory. Nice.

Google does that too - it's not unique to Yahoo. I personally don't like the idea but understand why they do it sometimes.

Brian.

Oh, and SEOforGoogle, what are you doing in the Yahoo forum saying that Yahoo has been great for you? Did you get lost looking for the Google forum? Just kidding. Always nice to hear that the algo does work for someone.

[wednesday]

For me the algo yes, the SERP mods... Well if the engineers can't do it then the mods have to. :)

[SEOforGoogle]

Oh, and SEOforGoogle, what are you doing in the Yahoo forum saying that Yahoo has been great for you? Did you get lost looking for the Google forum? Just kidding. Always nice to hear that the algo does work for someone.

Well, even though most people are obsessed with Google, I know that you still need to rank well in all the search engines...maybe I could also get SEOforYahoo for a screenName? :-p

[brian.mark]

Oh, and SEOforGoogle, what are you doing in the Yahoo forum saying that Yahoo has been great for you? Did you get lost looking for the Google forum? Just kidding. Always nice to hear that the algo does work for someone.

Well, even though most people are obsessed with Google, I know that you still need to rank well in all the search engines...maybe I could also get SEOforYahoo for a screenName? :-p

How about SEOforAll? ;-)

I was just joking. Of course it's important to rank everywhere you can, even if the big one gets almost as much traffic as the rest combined. Fortunately, that's not quite the case any more.

Brian.

[greeneagle]

Looking back over the last several posts here about YAHOO, I don't see anything good. Is it really that that dismal?

How about YAHOO storefront Site owners? Have you lost out in what might be termed a "glutinous bulge" too? How are you faring?

Ken

[brian.mark]

Google showed 36.5% in July.
Yahoo 30.5%.
MSN 15.5%.

Source: comScore Media Metrix

Maybe Yahoo shows higher usage than previous months because people are having to search more to get through the spam... ;-)

Actually, for the terms I monitor they've been better lately. They still like ranking our deep pages above the more relevant pages, but I'll live with that for now. They've certainly been sending us a lot more traffic over the past couple of weeks.

Brian.

[sem-seo-pro]

I may be mistaken but I could swear I read on some forum that Yahoo has dropped dumped sites with Google Adsense Ads.

I have a new client with just one page showing now in Yahoo which used to have all his pages indexed till recently.

I've written and no response.

Clint

[greenkey]

Yes just to back up what sem-seo-pro said. My site which had prominent search position for several searches now doesnt even appear to be in the index any more, it has google ads on it.

Is it worth taking the ads off and seeing if it comes back? or is this change going to be reversed soon.

[brian.mark]

Just to stir up the pot a bit, one site that I did without any rankings or concern for rankings now ranks in both G and Y, and it has AdSense on it. Of course, the content is unique and the ads were an afterthought when it quit being promoted locally in order for us to get something back from the site. But, since earnings are up (we're using those as this customer's hosting payment at the moment), I think that's a nice little bonus. ;-)

Brian.

[sem-seo-pro]

Hi Greenkey

I cannot confirm that Yahoo is bamming Adsense sites but this is the second client who is suffering a filter or penalty of some sort.

Only the index page shows in Yahoos site search.

Other than the Google Adsense ads which there is one small set the site is clean and never used any black hat steps or anything that could resemble spam.

Is this perhaps due to the upsurge in pages Yahoo indexed or are they aslo clearing out the scraper sites that use Adsense heavily??

Clint

[DMC_34]

I cannot confirm that Yahoo is bamming Adsense sites but this is the second client who is suffering a filter or penalty of some sort.

I still see an Adsense only site at #3 on Yahoo for a highly competitive keyword gift baskets (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=gift+baskets&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8)

DMC

[greenkey]

I can see the gift basket site you mention. Its a puzzle, My site had adsense on only some pages not all, it also didnt have any on the home page unlike this site.

One site with adsense on and still in the yahoo serps I guess doesnt prove a theory. All I know is my site isnt even indexed anymore, I can't see any seo reasons for it as it is not over optimised or using black seo stuff.

I'm more inclined to think that adsense sites have been purged and this is just an exception, you always tend to get them when algo's change. Although like most thinks in this business somebody always seems to prove your theory wrong.

I will remove all the adsense from the site and see if I can get re added. I will let you know what happens.

[DMC_34]

I doubt Adsense is the reason. I would look for other reasons.

DMC

[brian.mark]

Really, I see lots of non-adsense sites that have the same problems. There are several emails sent to me daily about "My site dropped out of Yahoo's index ad only the home page is left in." None of these sites have AdSense on them as far as I can tell (maybe in some obscure corner, but not anywhere prominent.)

At this point, it just feels like Yahoo has some technology issues, especially with 302's and scraper sites (still issues, but slowly getting better). They've got a lot to offer (20 billion, right) if they ever get their algo sorted out and get us some decent SERPs and more consistent indexing.

Brian.

[freehits]

Brian you are right on I believe. My "often-scraped" sites got ripped in the last algo "downgrade" by yahoo. Adsense had no connection at all from what i see. Yahoo is a mess, and the update seemed to favor threads and forum post spam from what I saw. Those types of pages made the biggest upward move. Also the number of same URL results increased as well. I see some results with as many as 4-5 pages showing on page#1.

[ozchris]

I'd also love to hear if anyone finds a solution to this.

My site also has only the index page listed, when it used to have all of them.

The cached version is from last week.

Love to know what's going on.

[ozchris]

My site that is suffering is www.womens-health-and-fitness.com.

When I first put it up a few months ago, I also created a related blog, did the blog-and-ping a few times to get it up, and all pages were happily indexed at Yahoo for a few weeks.

Then suddenly, all but the index page disappeared, as evidenced by the site: command.

(The blog is still happy at around position 15)

I just got an email from Mark Hendrick's mailing list (a very good one btw) pointing to this: http://www.hunteridge.com/ac.htm

It uses php includes and IP addresses to block robots from detecting Adsense ads on your site.

Now as a cheapskate, I could be tempted to redo my site with the Adsense code as a php include, and use the robots statement to exclude Yahoo's slurp from reading that file.

Do you think this would work?

Having never played with robot files, what is the exact format for excluding Yahoo, as they seem to be the only ones dropping us for no reason.

I did a lot of research building that site, and don't see why I should get tarred with the same brush as scraper sites.

[jestep]

Yahoo has absolutely lost it....

Since about 2 weeks ago, Yahoo has lost almost all relevancy at all. The SERPS are cluttered with craigslist classifieds from weeks ago and irrelevant forum posts.

I am used to Yahoo having some crap in the results but now I cant even find any real results in all of the crap. For now, I have completely given up on searching with Yahoo. In conjunction with Overture having massive problems for a month now, I don't think I would buy any stock in Yahoo right now.

Yahoo needs to figure this crap out. I don't hear positive comments about Yahoo anymore at all. Viral marketing can be just as negative as it can be positive.