Major SERPs change

[pne]

I've been running a check on 45 search terms for approximately 12 weeks. They're a mixture of competitive and non competitive phrases. It appears that Yahoo have completed their first major SERPs update for several months, indeed their first update since parting with Google. These results are also feeding into MSN.

pne

[sfowler]

Yes, I agree. I have just checked and there seems to have been a major shift. I don't know how long the partnership with MSN will go on for. They have also been very busy crawling recently.

[pne]

Simon,

Agree about MSN. I wonder what algo changes have been made? Searches so far seem better than previously. What do you think?

pne

[OtitO]

there are still a lot of spam sites yahoo is not able to recognize. Google does. Talking algo, I hope this was not a big algo change.

[Jamie]

Well I hope the shifting is not over. Five days ago my rankings were great for one day after I had disappeared for 2 month and than for part of yesterday they were excellent and now key word which I was ranked number 1 and 2 for I am now past 100. Otito is correct they miss many spam sites. For one key word 8 of first 10 are the same spam site with different domains but the same non relevant content.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by pne

It appears that Yahoo have completed their first major SERPs update for several months, indeed their first update since parting with Google.

Why do you think it is "completed" as opposed to still ongoing? Has the jitters stopped for more than two or three hours, or is this just your gut feeling.

I will take your gut call on this, btw, pne. ;0)

[AcmeSEO]

I would agree that Yahoo has done something big in the last week and it is an improvement. By improvement, I mean that, Search Engine Optimization seems to be working better.

For a while it looked to me as if the Yahoo algorithm worked like this:

If-- page is ranking well in Google...
Then-- assess a penalty so it won't work in Yahoo.

Silly me!

To whoever it was that said, "Who Yahoo's anymore anyway?"

I reply, "with Yahoo having 27% of the Search market, and being at #2 in the Gorilla pecking order, you would be silly to ignore them if you claim to be a Search marketer."

This is not meant to be interpreted that I think Gorillas have beaks!

Peace out!

[mike]

Originally Posted by AcmeSEO

To whoever it was that said, "Who Yahoo's anymore anyway?"

I reply, "with Yahoo having 27% of the Search market, and being at #2 in the Gorilla pecking order, you would be silly to ignore them if you claim to be a Search marketer."

This is not meant to be interpreted that I think Gorillas have beaks!

It was me, I was being facetious (I get that way when I skip my meds). I actually like Yahoo. They fed me and gave me free drinks at their SES party.

[AjiNIMC]

Hi all,

Its good that atleast I can see my new title but many of my top listing is gone.

I am at #5 in google for a very high competitive keyphrase but nowhere in yahoo , has to be a penalty , what is it????????

My site is clean and donot go anything bad or manipulative rather offering good content to our customers, in the last few months we have re-learned that customers are the kings.

Can anyone say that whats wrong with yahoo or what are the reasons I am not in yahoo. Earlier I was at #23 in yahoo. I am still there in msn (top 10).

Thanks a lot.

[pne]

Good posts,

My feeling (yup Ronnie it's no more than that) is that there is likely to be another 3-5 days before SERPs properly settle. My reasoning is that when the first (tentative) trial update was done weekend before last MSN weren't accessing Yahoo results. Now they are. They're still a bit shaky (results for my control phrases vary by about 6 positions on average over last 48 hours) but I think it's here.

BTW Yahoo still hasn't updated cache for any other than top level domain for my site.

pne

[sfowler]

I agree that it will not completely settle for a while. They will also see the problems and do some algo tweaking in the next week or so. Slurp has been busier than ever in the last couple of days, it is still the indexing that is causing a problem.

[Ralyn]

I've been in the process of transferring my old site, http://undertherainbow0.tripod.com to my new one, www.undertherainbow.us the last several months. I have totally neglected the old site since last fall and was getting ready to start tearing it down and re-routing the links the other day, until I discovered that it had jumped to #3 rating on Yahoo (and quite a few other engines) for one of my main targeted keyword phrases "Under The Rainbow". Now I'm afraid to touch it. Any advice?

[ronniethedodger]

Ralyn - leave your Tripod site up in full. Add exclusions for Googlebot on your Tripod site where you think the content will be duplicitous. I have not looked at the Tripod site, but you can do a combination of robots.txt and the googlebot metas of noindex, follow (you will want googlebot to follow still).

You will probably want to "ween" Yahoo on a continual basis until they get their act together.

[Ralyn]

I'm still new and learning at all this--you lost me on the googlebot exclusion, lol. I have a robots.txt on the new site that was generated by one the sites I use for keyword checking, but don't really know how to use it or it's effectiveness. The tripod site was my very first project in web design, I knew absolutely nothing when I built it other than I wanted an online craft mall, and used tripod's site-builder(I like Dreamweaver much better). I've spent the last 2 years studying and tracking down info and resources to teach myself, so would appreciate any direction on where to go to learn more about robots.txt.

[tcampione]

I'm one happy dude! My site has been online less than 4 more months. For my 4 word phrase with a pool of about 40,000 I've been #1 for a couple of months. For my more general 3 word phrase with a pool of 1.32 million, I've been moving steadily higher and reached #40 about 2 weeks ago.

Today, for that phrase. . . #1. I'm hoping ol' slurpee doesn't change a thing from here on out.

What is really interesting is that 2 weeks ago I had position #40 and and #63. One was my directory listing. That is, it displayed my company name and brief description as it appears in the Yahoo directory. The other listing was of course the actual meta title and meta description. I don't know which was which, but my directory style listing is the one that moved into the #1 spot. The other fell to #78.

So, what was #40 & #63 is now #1 & #78. But, they are both the same physical page (default.htm).

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Ralyn

I'm still new and learning at all this--you lost me on the googlebot exclusion, lol. I have a robots.txt on the new site that was generated by one the sites I use for keyword checking, but don't really know how to use it or it's effectiveness. The tripod site was my very first project in web design, I knew absolutely nothing when I built it other than I wanted an online craft mall, and used tripod's site-builder(I like Dreamweaver much better). I've spent the last 2 years studying and tracking down info and resources to teach myself, so would appreciate any direction on where to go to learn more about robots.txt.

Ralyn - there are two ways to exclude robots. One is with the robots.txt file (preferred) and the other with a meta tag on a page by page basis.

Complete instructions for robots.txt can be found here.

In a nutshell on robots.txt, to disallow access for Slurp only on specific pages or directories:

User-agent: slurp
Disallow: /directory/ # Disallow for entire directory
Disallow: /foo.html   # Disallow an individual page

Meta tags are pretty basic. You will insert these inside your <HEAD> elements of the Html. The default for the ROBOTS meta is:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

That tag is not really needed since it is default behaviour for spiders to follow links and index pages.

In the case of Googlebot, you can single it out as follows (so far I am unaware for one for Slurp):

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

If you do not want Googlebot to index a page, then:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

You may not want to do this after all. Instead, have the spiders crawl the old site ... but change your content. Take advantage of the old Tripod site.

I noticed that you had a notice on the Tripod Home Page. Put a heading above it in the color red to make it more obvious that you are moving.

Add a "sitemap" of sorts to that Tripod homepage with keyword rich anchor text to major landing pages at the new site. This will be good for visitors who show up also and get them right where they need to go. It will also provide more backlinks to your site.

Maintain your Title Meta Description and Meta Keyword tags as is. Whatever Yahoo saw in those that gave you good rankings, keep it.

Start converting your old Tripod pages into sparse summaries of your products or information. As with the Meta and Title elements ...maintain your <Hx> heading elements as is ... this will keep Slurp on your side a while longer until it picks up the new site.

Put specific links to your new site in those summaries with good anchor text. Add in a brief notice informing your visitors about the new site and update their bookmarks if they have them.

Rip out all the fluff from your Tripod pages too. Ditch the graphics, nested tables, make it clean, lean, and mean -- but with a little elegance (nice site design btw, I like it better than the new one)

If you have any outstanding link partners to the old Tripod site -- get in touch with them to change over to the new site.

Google has picked up the new site in total it appears. Yahoo will eventually come around. In the meantime, best to ride the wave of good results you have now at Yahoo.

[Ralyn]

Thank you very much-- the more I learn, the more I find out that I don't know and need to learn, lol.

[Ralyn]

Thank you very much-- the more I learn, the more I find out that I don't know and need to learn, lol.

[AcmeSEO]

Originally Posted by Mike

I actually like Yahoo. They fed me and gave me free drinks at their SES party.

They did throw a nice party in San Jose, didn't they. I think I gained two permanent pounds that night. Your own Garrett and I got to have a traditional West African Drum jam in the tech museum that night. That was fun. We jammed for about 15 minutes. Then I'm like, hey do I know you? Oh yeah, I see your picture every week. He sorta looks like those pics too.

I'd vote that Go Toast threw the best party though, both last year and this one.

Robert