Did Yahoo Fix 301 Bug Yet?

jmdb71 · #1 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 03:28 PM

Does anyone know if Yahoo has corrected their handling of 404 redirects?

To clarify, for those who dont know, Yahoo was punishing sites for correctly using the 404 pages when content changed. In my case, i ported a site to a new url and used 404 (permanent change) redirects to redirect the url. Google handles this great, dropping the old url and picking up the new one immediately, but Yahoo hangs on to the old url, adding the updated content, and pushes the new url way back. I hope this made sense.

Anyway, is it fixed?

flood6 · #2 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmdb71

Does anyone know if Yahoo has corrected their handling of 404 redirects?

To clarify, for those who dont know, Yahoo was punishing sites for correctly using the 404 pages when content changed. In my case, i ported a site to a new url and used 404 (permanent change) redirects to redirect the url. Google handles this great, dropping the old url and picking up the new one immediately, but Yahoo hangs on to the old url, adding the updated content, and pushes the new url way back. I hope this made sense.

Anyway, is it fixed?

Well, it is a 301 redirect, and I saw in a WMW thread last week that it was not fixed yet. I don't know how "official" that news was, but it's all I've heard lately.

jmdb71 · #3 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 04:18 PM

oops,
I meant 301 redirect - thanks for catching that and for the informative response.

I hope this gets fixed soon, so i can enjoy traffic from yahoo as well..

flood6 · #4 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 04:36 PM

LOL, I was going to point you to a couple of posts at WMW, but then I saw one of them was started by you, so I guess you are already aware of it...

robinev · #5 (**permalink**) 07-28-2004, 08:13 AM

It definitely isn't fixed yet.

It's a really bad bug, but Yahoo seems to get a pass on it. I've seen very few complaints about it even though it's a problem not just for website owners, but also for searchers.

I redesigned our site a few months ago and changed the names of a few pages. I added 301 redirects from the old name to the new name.

I also had to add 301 redirects to handle a number of long-dead four- or five-year old pages that Yahoo added to their index rather than actually spidering the site.

Yahoo only half-way picks up the redirect. They index the new page's content (in their ever-so-slow way), but they maintain sometimes ancient url's to the new page.

Instead of using the redirect to replace an outdated url, they use the old url for the new page content.

Truly bizarre.

Imagine the outrage if Microsoft were to let a similar bug continue for months in thier new index. Maybe folks just don't expect technical competence from Yahoo. And, of course, we don't get it.

bhartzer · #6 (**permalink**) 07-28-2004, 05:28 PM

I will talk to the Yahoo! representatives next week when I'm at the Search Engine Strategies conference and will try to get a definitive answer on the 301 issue.

I would like to know the status of this issue and will try to pin them down for an answer.

HardCoded · #7 (**permalink**) 08-01-2004, 03:55 AM

You'd really think that such a large company would not be so incompetent with such an important issue. Why is it so hard?

Crap is crap, and it will determine the outcome of the bid to compete with Google.

jenvil · #8 (**permalink**) 08-04-2004, 04:46 AM

It would seem to not be fixed yet...if I search for our new UK site using link:http etc YAhoo lists about 17 old bad redirects...

The Yahoo listings show the homepage title and url at the top for our australian site with a snippet of home page text but with old dead urls which were redirected to the home page.(long corrected in accordance with their new guidelines to point to new sites which replace the old ones)

Meanwhile we are not in the search results at all...

robinev · #9 (**permalink**) 08-04-2004, 08:27 PM

Yup. As HardCoded said, "Crap is crap". And these are all examples that Yahoo's results are likely to be crap on any given search.

There seem to be a couple of problems at work here.

One is that Yahoo seems to have thrown together a number of old indexes in order to claim to have something approaching the number of files that Google has in its index.

Unfortunately, Yahoo doesn't seem capable of spidering fast enough to fix the outdated entries that they threw into their index.

And even when they do spider a site, their 301 bug causes bizarre entries. As an example, check the Yahoo entries for "Queen City Cruise" [without quotation marks]. There are two entries for my site in that search. Both #4 and #6 list a urls that were replaced and redirected months ago. Both also show preview text that's at least a year old even though Yahoo has spidered the new page and has it in its index.

Although I'm not getting it on today's search, I've seen them provide an even more bizarre result. They'll occasionally show the new page name and sample text from the new page but associate that page with a two-year old url.

And that is crap. A big TV ad budget and a loyal user base will help them for only so long. Eventually their users may begin to notice that they're getting bad results too often and turn elsewhere. At the very least, associated companies should be questioning whether a buggy Yahoo is a wise choice as an SE partner.

buddhu · #10 (**permalink**) 08-09-2004, 11:38 AM

This really is *such* a pain in the rear.

Historically, before I got SEO duties, our company used to point loads of domains at the same IP and content. Since I took over SEO I've been struggling to get approval to redirect all these with 301, as Google seem to prefer. At the end of the day, as Yahoo indexes us under one of the non-primary branding domains (and ranks us at positions like #1 and #2 for most of our top terms) I obviously don't want to lose that advantage. So, I can redirect most of the domains with 301, but thanks to Yahoo's cr*p support for this standard method I'm *still* stuck with at least two domains for the same content.

Keeping my fingers crossed that Google don't decide to take issue with that.

ronniethedodger · #11 (**permalink**) 08-10-2004, 06:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bhartzer

I will talk to the Yahoo! representatives next week when I'm at the Search Engine Strategies conference and will try to get a definitive answer on the 301 issue.

I would like to know the status of this issue and will try to pin them down for an answer.

Did you ever get an answer on this?

buddhu · #12 (**permalink**) 08-26-2004, 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

Quote:

Originally Posted by bhartzer

I will talk to the Yahoo! representatives next week when I'm at the Search Engine Strategies conference and will try to get a definitive answer on the 301 issue.

I would like to know the status of this issue and will try to pin them down for an answer.

Did you ever get an answer on this?

I'm also very eager to know of any progress here :)

sem4u · #13 (**permalink**) 09-09-2004, 11:16 AM

So am I. I have two domains caught up with this isse.