Why is Y! so volatile with its results?

[hunegnaw]

Every morning I check both Google and Yahoo! for the search term 'part time jobs' and others and consistently come up in the top 5 search results in Google. Yahoo! results are all over the place. One day we can be #5 the next #17 and then back to #3.

The kicker is that everyone else that we compete with seems to stay consistent. What could we be doing wrong? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

_____________
GROOVEJOB.COM
Part time jobs for students and teens!
http://www.groovejob.com/

[Blackicicle]

I think that's a plus for yahoo, (Which I find myself using whenever googlw spits me garbage) in fact I think that a company with a search engine with a somewhat similar feature it the only thing IMO that can take google down.

Quite frankly I get TIRED of searching and finding the SAME sites over and over again on google. I would love to see the top 1-50 sites rotate in a somewhat random pattern and the top 51-100 etc... Or at least give the option through cookies to do so!

There are many Great (somtimes even better) sites that are on position 9 or 21 on that never even gets seen by anyone. Thats why my serps preferences are set to 100 sites per search![/i]

[Kenai Alaska]

Not every site is consistent.
Yesterday I was reading a great article I found in the top results of a Yahoo search about the effects of television content on the behaviors and habits of young viewers. Well it was my sons 16th birthday so I closed the browser when he came home from school intending to come back later that night to finish reading it. Unfortunately I had failed to book mark the site, first mistake. Using the same search, I have never found the article again.
Funny thin is today the information is all over the news and even on Paul Harvey's commentary.
As a general rule I agree that joggling the results is good, right up until the time that I can't find what I am looking for again. But this was a rare occasion to see a sight totally disappear in less than six hours.
Seems like there's always two sides to every thought we have.

[allanp73]

I've noticed the same kind of inconsistancy. I think Yahoo might have more that one data ceneter because sometimes people see different results than me at same time. In many ways I find Yahoo very similar to the pre-Florida Google. Possibly this why I like it so much.

[YahooMike]

One thing that might be causing changes in the results are tests. We do a lot of testing and with that sometimes results fluctuate.

Another cause might be changes to made to a site (ie: webmasters testing to see what will work best). These types of changes might cause results to fluctuate.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Mike

[giftsun]

Funny...I find that with google my site ranks all over the place for the same keywords, Yet remain consistent with Yahoo. Personally I believe that the most relevant sites should always remain at the top, until another site becomes more relevant. Cycling the search results would be doing the opposite of what search engines are all about.

[Blackicicle]

I glad you mentioned that giftsun...
Which of these three site do you think is more relivant?

Site 1

or

Site 2

or

site 3

They are all great RELIVANT sites for digital cameras, which one of them is MORE relivant? Different people would choose a different site from those three to be the most relivant to them, but you'd be surprised by where they show up in the serps and in what order.

In fact one was selected from from position 1x another from 3x and another from 5x..

...Relivance is a tricky word.

[JAG0000]

Why not have an option in a search engine to give you the top ten results on the first page with the next page being either that of a shuffled top 100, or the next 11-20 in ranked order. It would not be that hard to have the choice.
We have found our sites key word rankings move alot in Google and very little in Yahoo.

[mysteryminds]

Y! is doing better job than google these days I think. Google is doing all the crazy things and these days its not even checking the doorway pages for most of the sites.

Yahoo even though it shuffles on every day basis the results are more appropriate than showing the same old sites for every search like google.

e.g: in google when we search for Hotels in Indian Ocean, google displays the restaurantes and lodges in first 20 list. But its not the same case with Yahoo.

Compare to BOT - :-) slurp is doing good job :-) and more appropriate results.

[Artyom]

Originally Posted by hunegnaw

The kicker is that everyone else that we compete with seems to stay consistent. What could we be doing wrong? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Hunegnaw,
I have the same situation with my "adult trade show design" k/w at Y! and to be accurately if our sites move up and down at SERRs it means that at least one our competitor goes up and down as well;-)

Personally I don't really think it's awful (I agree it's wierd:-) ) as long as we stay on first page and other guys among 10 results do not have as good titles+descriptions as we have.

[giftsun]

I glad you mentioned that giftsun...
Which of these three site do you think is more relivant?

You have a point Izzy. One might be more relevant to you but not to me. But it is google that decides relevance (for their rankings anyway)and as long as the sites show up in the top rankings then that should be fine because in searching I would think we would compare what sites have to offer rather than just jump at a site just because it is listed at #1.

What I find interesting is that I have been giving away free catalogs to visitors to my site if they fill out a form telling me what search engine and search term they used to find my site. So far none of the search terms they used ranked higher than 16 on either Google or Yahoo. Some even far lower thatn that. Seems to me people might be looking deeper into search results than we previously thought.

[hunegnaw]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all of the feedback so far. Our goal has always been to keep our site clean, easy to navigate and full of great (and highly relevant) content. And if you look at Google, we consistently come up in the top 5 for 'part time jobs' and No. 1 for over 1,000 other search terms. It can be frustrating to see some of the other sites that come up in Y!'s top 10 results... consistently.

Check this out... if you do a "site:www.groovejob.com", check out the results:

Yahoo: 243 pages
Google: 56,800 pages!

It's like Y! hardly even knows that we're out here. How do we get Y! to recognize our efforts?

Thanks,

hunegnaw

[hunegnaw]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all of the feedback so far. Our goal has always been to keep our site clean, easy to navigate and full of great (and highly relevant) content. And if you look at Google, we consistently come up in the top 5 for 'part time jobs' and No. 1 for over 1,000 other search terms. It can be frustrating to see some of the other sites that come up in Y!'s top 10 results... consistently.

Check this out... if you do a "site:www.groovejob.com", check out the results:

Yahoo: 243 pages
Google: 56,800 pages!

It's like Y! hardly even knows that we're out here. How do we get Y! to recognize our efforts?

Thanks,

hunegnaw

[SFSunMedia]

Yahoo actually drops my site from the rankings every week or so, than all of a sudden my site will reappear in the rankings a few days later. After observing listings daily I realized only the sites listed in the Yahoo Directory have stable rankings.

[upperhand]

From what I've noticed, and I could be smoking crack, but every time Yahoo crawls my site and finds a decent amount of modifications, my site will dissappear, only to reappear a day or two later. The last time it did this, I went from #5 under "Bartending" to #4. I think Yahoo is essentially re-shuffling the updated site back into the mix?

Cheers!

Josh

[kathleenitomic]

Yeah, I've actually noticed a similar thing, Dave... I use Web Position Gold to report on my SEO clients' rankings from week to week, and over the last 3 weeks or so, Yahoo and MSN have been going crazy! I've seen sites jump 50 places. This week Yahoo seems to have settled down, but MSN is still showing me leaps of 27 places.

But the thing is, these jumps are happening without me making significant changes week to week.
Of course my link building campaign continues... so I wonder if it's just the results of my ongoing efforts finally kicking in, or some test/changes to the way they rank sites?

[cbp]

I use Web Position Gold to report on my SEO clients' rankings from week to week

Are you trying to get them or your own IP address banned?

CBP

[pne]

My feeling is that Yahoo is very buggy at the moment.

It returns different cache versions of my site depending on what I search for. Hope it settles down real soon.

pne