Yahoo! Search Optimization Archives

A HighRankings Forum thread asks when did Yahoo stop grouping search results from the same domain together? We reported on an issue with Google not grouping certain results a few weeks ago, but it is rare to see Google not group results in many cases. But Yahoo doesn't seem to be grouping any results from the same domain together, at least not today.

For example, a search on george bush at Yahoo shows three results from the White House web site, and two right next to each other, but none of them are grouped together:

A search at Google on george bush groups a few of the results together, when the domain is the same, including the White House results:

So where did the indenting go Yahoo Search?

The thread also talks about missing how Yahoo used to number the results, but that is an older topic.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Update: Yahoo has actually never grouped results. I have official confirmation from Yahoo on that.

This weekend, we have reports coming from WebmasterWorld of major ranking changes at Yahoo Search. It appears Yahoo has started an algorithm and indexing update at their search engine.

Currently there are no "weather reports" with the status of an update at the Yahoo Search Blog, but based on the conversation at the thread, there appears to be an updating taking place. The last update took place in early March, but in reality, most SEOs and webmasters did not notice any changes. So maybe this is the legit update?

Here is some of the feedback from the thread:

I did some more thorough investigating and these results are really bad....

We lost about 50% of our Y! traffic during the last update and we noticed a nice lift today.

Looks like an update to me. See wiki pages climbing to the top for many results. Why do they even want for each term a wiki to turn up. If I want a wiki explanation or information, I'll go to it myself. I find it a step back for search results.

I suspect Yahoo will have a post on the update soon at their Yahoo Search Blog. Since this is happening on the tax day weekend, why not call it the Yahoo Tax Day update? Heck, maybe some of you can use this update as a deduction for 2008? ;-)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Kevin Gibbons blogged about his recent discovery that Yahoo Site Explorer is available for users in the United Kingdom and Ireland. His blog post contains screenshots of the tool, but UK members can access Yahoo! Site Explorer right here.

Is it any different than our regular Yahoo! Site Explorer? Not so much. However, Kevin makes the following observation:

From the searches I've done they seem to be ordering these with UK links towards the top, there's definitely some non-UK links in there as well though.

What are your findings?

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has dozens of reports that Yahoo Search's crawler, Yahoo Slurp, took some bad medicine recently. Many are reporting that they see the crawler spidering their sites like never before. Some times they have seen the spider multiple to over a 1,000 crawls at one time.

The first report claimed about 500 Yahoo spiders:

I have a forum and I get 500+ (sometimes 800+) Yahoo spiders daily. Why is there so many? I only get 1 or 2 Google spiders.

Others reported similar cases with much more Yahoo spider activity then Google spider activity. These reports seemed to have died down recently.

The initial report came at Friday afternoon and then died out Saturday afternoon. So maybe it was just a temporary Yahoo glitch?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo sent me a statement update this behavior:

On March 29th and 30th, some of you have noticed Yahoo! Slurp spidering your website more than usual – this temporary blip was inadvertently caused by a major crawl infrastructure upgrade we have been doing for last 1 month.

While the Yahoo! Slurp should be stable now, if you continue to notice unreasonable traffic from Yahoo! spiders, please provide feedback at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Search Team

A DigitalPoint Forums has reports from dozens of webmasters that their link counts in the tool are way down.

Some users are reporting as much as of an 80-percent reduction in the number of links Yahoo Site Explorer is finding for their sites.

Lost about 75% on all sites today.

Ya! This was a huge drop though..not the usual slight fluctuation. i lost like 12k links.

I don't track my links on a frequent basis for this site, but I was able to dig up a past link count that I posted here back in October 2007 where I found I had 216,880 inlinks reported. Today, Yahoo Site Explorer reports I have 271,196 inlinks. So I don't see any reductions and I also checked some tools that might have been tracking this for me on an automated basis and I see no reduction.

(1) Either this site was not impacted or
(2) This was a temporary bug that is now fixed.

Are your Yahoo inlinks report down drastically?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As an extension to Search Monkeys, a way for Yahoo to display enriched content within the search results for publishers (here is a screen shot to shock your memory):

Yahoo last week announced support for microformats to help webmasters provide a richer search experience for Yahoo searchers when it comes to Yahoo indexing and showing results for your site. The supported formats include hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. The supported vocabulary includes Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and also RDFa and eRDF to render those pages in HTML.

All very wonderful, right? Well, maybe not - as some SEOs and webmasters say. Their main concern is that by providing such a structured format of their content - content scrapers will need very little skill in stealing their content and repurposing it in a useful manner. SEOs and webmasters don't mind Yahoo getting this data from them, but they know that leaving this easy to use and structured format open to Yahoo will also give anyone else access to their data. Same issue with XML but this is even more fine tuned data, because webmasters can detail minute details about their content. Here are some of the comments from SEOs:

On the other hand they also make it much easier for somebody else to rip-off the essence of your site. No need to program a screen-scraper to recognize how you've organized things on your pages - you've already done the work for them!

While some don't want to hand over the data to Yahoo, so the Yahoo searcher can ge the "quick answer" and not even bother visiting their site for more information:

I'm not building a database so people can simply find everything they seek on G or Y, without having to visit my sites. Many might be doing that, but we are not.

Some are worried about spam via phone and email increasing:

I'm worried that applying such microformats will also lead to more mailings and phone calls from people wanting to sell you something. It does make it easier to harvest specific databases on the web.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Postscript: Amit, the product manager for this program sent me this note:

We believe that a richer experience in search results will benefit users, and hence increase traffic to the publishers for whom such experiences can be created. Of course, structured data is required to power these experiences.

As a publisher, if you choose to share this structured data with the world, through microformats or RDFa or eRDF, we'd be supportive of that, and consume the structured data through those means. If you choose to give your structured data only to Yahoo!, you can do that through feeds, or exposing this markup only to our crawlers. Finally, if you don't want to markup your page, or send us feeds, that's perfectly fine, too!

Hopefully that clears up any confusion. This open platform will be available to all publishers, and they can participate to the extent they'd like to!

Amit

Yahoo Search announced an update will be taking place today. They wrote the typical line:

We're in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

But no one has seen any changes, no where - not at WebmasterWorld, not at any of the forums - like we typically do. In fact a WebmasterWorld thread said Yahoo announced an update, but everyone is asking if anyone else is noticing any changes. When people start noticing any changes, I will post a summary of those changes.

For now, the only interesting thing I see is a comment at the Yahoo Search Blog that says he is seeing lowercase titles in Yahoo search. I wrote about this a while back at Search Engine Land, Are Lower Case Titles In Yahoo Coming From Anchor Text, but it was fixed soon after. I currently don't see any examples of new lowercase titles in Yahoo Search.

The last Yahoo update started about January 18th, 2008 and completed around January 29th.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I have been hearing reports from friends in the industry that the external link reports at Google Webmaster Tools have not been updated for an unusually long time. I personally stop tracking those updates back in November 2007. We now have a Google Groups thread that shows complaints about the report not being updated and Google taking notice. Googler, Susan Moskwa said:

Thanks for the reports, folks; we're taking a look at it.

Supposedly, an update has not happened since the beginning of January.

So you would think people would jump to Yahoo's Site Explorer tool to get more up to date link reports. But we have been seeing recent reports of stability issues with the Yahoo link tool. Over the course of the end of last week, we have reports of the tool going up and down sporadically. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread have reports as early as February 21st. Sometimes the tool is completely offline, sometimes the link reports are not coming back when requested. Must be really annoying for some SEOs not to have either reporting tool.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The January 2008 Yahoo Search Update is reportedly now fizzling out. A WebmasterWorld thread says the results are beginning to look stable and the update seems to be settling out.

Typically with Yahoo updates, the results initially look out of place and some listings seem a bit awkward. Towards the end of the update, results stop moving around and results begin to set in their place.

WebmasterWorld's senior member, BillyS said:

As of yesterday things seemed to have settled down. It looks like we might be at steady state now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am seeing early signs of reports of a Yahoo Search index and algorithm update. The last update at Yahoo Search was on December 3rd of last year, so we are well due an update.

We have threads at both WebmasterWorld (see new posts of this old thread) and at DigitalPoint Forums, with signals that the update has begun. And about 99% of the time, we report the update before the official Yahoo Search Blog does - so expect a post there today or within a few days.

One WebmasterWorld member said:

My rankings are starting to show up again, but not even close to where they once were. I must admit, that I am glad to see that I am not the only one. What's up with Yahoo?

A DigitalPoint member said:

Yes, I saw changes... something is updating right now...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread asks if Google indexes and ranks Apple .Mac pages. Basically, .Mac is just a hosting service for Mac users, who pay for a "Dot Mac" subscription.

Googler, JohnMu, said Google does index and rank .Mac files. He linked to a site command for site:web.mac.com that clearly shows Google is indexing those files. But it appears Yahoo is indexing a lot more than Google, while Live Search is about the same as Google.

So in short, search engines have no reason not to index .mac hosted content. Just make sure those pages are search engine friendly and allowed via the robots.txt file and you should be set.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yahoo recently announced that they are supporting four new types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file: NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, and NOFOLLOW. The benefits of being able to declare these directives in the robots.txt file enables folks who store PDFs, Word Documents, and other files on the web and cannot easily place these directives in the header.

Google actually expanded its robots.txt protocol in July with the unavailable_after tag, and Sebastian discovered the Noindex: / directive to block Googlebot from crawling your entire site.

The downside to these changes is that you'll have to check the robots.txt file to see if link juice is passed.

Yahoo also announced that this is related to its most recent search update:

Along with this change, we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It has been WebmasterWorld about a possible update that started rolling out on December 1st.

Some reported seeing an update and then said Yahoo seemed to have rolled it back. But now more are reporting seeing significant changes in the Yahoo Search results.

Of course those who are negatively impacted are the loudest:

Observing lots of changes in Yahoo

Rankings have started to disappear :(

We currently do not have a "weather report" from the Yahoo Search Blog announcing the update. But typically, we beat out Yahoo posting such news by a day or two.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brian Turner is reporting at a Platinax Forum that Yahoo has changed the way they handle 301 redirects.

In the past, according to Yahoo! Redirect Handling Rules (PDF File), a 301 from Site A to Site B, Yahoo would keep the target URL. If the domain remained the same, it would not necessarily be the case, see the PDF file above to see the detailed rules.

Brian is claiming that Yahoo is now looking at the authority of the domain and if the domain has more "authority" than where it is 301 redirecting to, then it would keep the source (the more authoritative domain) as the main URL for that site, regardless of the 301.

Honestly, it seems like Brian tested this out on one domain. To me, this seems like a glitch on one particular site. We have no other reports of this in any of the other forums or any confirmations from other SEOs or webmasters on this topic, at this point in time.

Forum discussion at Platinax Forum.

There are numerous reports coming from DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo Site Explorer is reporting a huge reduction of pages and inlinks for sites.

Personally, I cannot confirm these reports to be true at this time. It appears my link counts and page index count is higher than was reported, since the last time I checked.

But many SEOs are saying they are seeing major reductions in those numbers.

Most of the sites I am usually checking have dropped to about 20% of backlinks they had 2 days ago ... I hope its something temporary again ... it happened 2 months ago ...

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week, we reported that Yahoo has released a product fix for the Site Explorer discrepancy regarding the number of inlinks being inaccurate, with registered users seeing different numbers than non-registered users.

The Yahoo! blog has announced today that the product fix is now complete. It looks like it's totally fixed now.

And if it's not, you can send Yahoo your feedback.

Nice.

Forum discussion is at WebmasterWorld.

It appears that some folks are buzzing about a new update taking place at Yahoo Search.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has one person documenting a major change in traffic from Yahoo:

Just like every morning I am checking my SERP's through the Keyword Ranking tool here at DP and to my astonishment I found that 90% of my sites lost rankings in Yahoo...

Most rankings have declined from top3 into lower top 10 or even top50 and my previous top10 rankings are now nearing the 100. ALL my hotel related sites lost rankings, while some of my other sites have gained some, but that is from outside top200 into top100.

This leads me to believe that they did on algo update today, but I would like to have some input from you all.

I personally reviewed a couple of my sites and noticed a decline in traffic from Yahoo on some sites and an increase in traffic from Yahoo on other sites. It may just be too early to tell. The last update was just about a month ago, so it does make sense that this can be an update.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Now there is chatter about an update at WebmasterWorld.

Update 2: Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the update saying:

Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

Two weeks ago, we reported that users using Yahoo! Site Explorer were seeing different results depending on whether they were logged in or not.

The Yahoo! Search Team has answered the call in a recent blog post, saying that a product fix was released:

While the counts have been incorrect in some cases, the actual returned results have been correct. However, we did roll out a product fix yesterday and will be rolling out a couple more over the next few days to resolve this difference in counts some of you have observed.

Thank you, Yahoo, for reading the Search Engine Roundtable. ;)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In August, Yahoo announced a new crawl behavior for Slurp, Yahoo's web crawler. The new crawl behavior was suppose to tame the crawler to go through your site in a more relaxed and efficient manner for both the crawler and your server.

But it seemed like soon after, Webmasters were not happy with the new crawler's behavior.

Recent discussions over at DigitalPoint Forums reports that Yahoo Slurp seemed to have taken it easy on some sites. It is hard to confirm that this is a global change, since only about four or five Webmaster have confirmed this activity, but it does seem like something may be up at Yahoo.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo Site Explorer is a wonderful tool to check your page index count and the number and source of links you have pointing to your site. But did you know that you get different results if you are logged into Site Explorer when compared to not being logged in and authenticated for that site?

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but I am not logged into Yahoo:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 14,999 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 57,146 inlinks to the home page from all pages. Now let's compare...

Here is a Site Explorer search for this site, but this time I am logged into Yahoo under the account I authenticated this site for:

Notice, here Yahoo reports seroundtable.com to have 15,556 pages indexed in Yahoo and a total of 216,880 inlinks to the home page from all pages.

That is a huge difference in numbers. 57,146 inlinks and 216,880 inlinks is a huge difference in the amount of data one can get about a site.

Is it possible that Yahoo is pulling back on showing all linkage data for a site to anyone? Now you need to be the authenticated webmaster to see full data? This is similar to how Google works.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Yahoo Site Explorer seems to be showing less and less link data every month for some sites.

Personally, I do not track my link counts in Yahoo Site Explorer. But at this moment in time, I see that this site has 64,564 links.

Many people report a large drop in those counts over the past few months.

I have three sites that lost over 1000 backlinks. how did this happen? did it happen to anyone else?

I went from 38000 to 2300

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo has announced they have revamped their search interface with a from "to do" to "done" approach. Basically, they have launched Search Assist, something they have been demoing for a while and revamped how multi-media is represented in the search results.

What is search assist, well the link above explains it, but in short, it is like Ask.com's refine search features but a bit more AJAX'ish. If you do a search on anything and click on the little arrow under the search box, it expands to show you those refinements:

Plus now if you search for multi-media related searches, you may get video results that can be played within the search results, like you can with Google results:

My only complaint is, where is star wars kid video? If I am searching for the star wars kid, I suspect to get a video, Google gives it to me. But typically, if you end your search in video, such as Michael Jordan Video, you will get a video result. Interesting how Yahoo is able to embed Meta Cafe's video into their own site, didn't Google have copyright issues with that?

Here is the detailed release as a PDF file [1.1MB], plus there is a ton of coverage at Techmeme, including Greg's coverage and Loren's coverage.

So now the top four search engines have somewhat blended or made their search results more "universal" within the year. A transformation as to what they have been doing in the past, is now the standard (kind of not at Ask.com but they get it done) at the four major search engines. For past coverage of each engine read:

• Google Revamps Search Results Landscape with Universal Search
• Ask.com Relaunches in 3D with Ask X Interface
• Microsoft Launches New Search Index & Algorithms

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

There seems to be a major update taking place at Yahoo! Search today. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread has chatter on it from SEOs.

One member said that his rankings "jumped from 168 to 29."

But is this update causing technical problems with searching over at Yahoo? An other WebmasterWorld thread reports Yahoo is telling searches they can't process their query:

We had temporary problems searching for web pages. Search again for MY SEARCH or type a new query above.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book seems to be the first to spot and call out this Yahoo update. He said he has seen a shift in rankings and problems with how they handle 301s, and a change in how they weight on domain names. Loren Baker also covered Aaron's post.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: It is now official, the Yahoo Search blog just posted a weather report.

Yesterday I reported on issues with Yahoo Site Explorer. It now appears that Yahoo Site Explorer is operating just fine.

With yesterday's issues, we reported that people were having problems accessing the tool. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has reports of people noticing a huge drop in the link counts for their domains around three or four days ago. Just in the past 24-hours, webmasters started noticing the link counts coming back to their normal numbers.

Looks like the backlinks are back to what they were before for my sites, as well.

Good to hear.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that the Yahoo LinkDomain command search is not functioning properly. When I personally try to conduct a linkdomain:seroundtable.com search, it simply times out.

I am also hearing reports that Yahoo Site Explorer is not responding. It isn't responding for me either.

In any case, I am sure it is a temporary issue that will be resolved soon. At least I hope so.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are early reports via WebmasterWorld of fluctuations in the rankings at Yahoo Search.

The reports came over the weekend where some have seen large jumps or declines in rankings within Yahoo.

Yes, I had a drop from #7 to #18 for a 1 word search that had been stable for a while. No other changes seen on that, or any other sites though.

This may be a small update, since the last update was just a few weeks ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld .

I am seeing reports from both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums that Yahoo is not supporting their own NOYDIR tag.

The NOYDIR is a tag you can use to tell Yahoo not to display your Yahoo Directory title in the Yahoo Search results. We have a few reports saying that Yahoo, all of a sudden, started showing the Yahoo Directory title for sites that have the NOYDIR tag on them.

Just this last few days Yahoo is ignoring this tag on my site:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />

And has reverted back to showing my Yahoo Directory title and description.

It is probably just a temporary bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Last week we reported on a Yahoo update and a new method of crawling. The new crawl behavior is supposed to help the Yahoo bot, Slurp, be more efficient on your site.

It seems that many SEOs and Webmasters are not happy with this change.

A WebmasterWorld thread has several negative comments:

OK, this is completely bogus and helps nobody. The number of IPs that Slurp uses? WHO CARES...

The fact that Yahoo has multiple crawlers for every division that crawl independently and don't share the common cache, now THAT's a problem that needs to be fixed.

We get 50% of our pages crawled every day.

Well Yahoo is a waste of bandwidth on one of my sites (a large directory). It hammers it almost every day and has only sent about 975 referrers this month. That is so low that I wonder if people even use Yahoo in Ireland for anything other than e-mail. I am strongly considering blocking it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced yesterday a new crawler behavior for the newly trained Slurp (Yahoo's search crawler). So instead of Slurp running around your site like an untamed animal, it is not more proper and polite.

I looked through the forums yesterday morning to find people discussing any ranking or traffic changes seen at Yahoo but came up with nothing.

Now, however, people are buzzing a bit about traffic changes seen from the Yahoo Search referrer.

One person saw a drop in traffic:

I just ran through some of my results page ranking for Yahoo and man-o-man have I taken a nosedive. Looking through G-Analytics its as if my site ceased to exist on Yahoo on August 18th.

An other person saw a huge spike in traffic:

I don't know if it's significant... but my Yahoo traffic quadrupled today and now outstrips my Google traffic. I don't know if it's a blip but it appears to be an improvement in traffic from Yahoo across the board and not from a few specific keywords.

Typically the forum threads come before any official Yahoo "weather report," but in this case, they came in after.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Last Thursday, July 19th, the Yahoo! Search Blog announced that they have started rolling out an update.

We've been rolling out some changes to our fresh web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed by the weekend. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

Since then, I have been waiting and seeking out threads discussing changes people have seen to the rankings in Yahoo. But I have yet to see any thread discussing any shifts and changes in the Yahoo Search results.

Typically, the forums spot these updates before they are announced. In this case, the announcement was made and still, there is fairly no discussion about changes in the search results.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement of the update. There is one person saying he saw an increase in traffic from Yahoo, "One of my site was getting 1 or 2 daily from yahoo, suddenly it got 10 so far now." But outside of that, the only discussion in the forums I track are from the Y!Search Blog announcement.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld

Update: People are now discussing minor changes in ranking.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a recent change in how Yahoo handles displaying a banned site within Yahoo Site Explorer.

In the past, Yahoo showed only the home page of a banned site in Yahoo Site Explorer. Now, there are early reports that Yahoo is changing that behavior. They are now starting to show all the pages they have in their index, but lowercasing the title of those pages.

It used to be that when these domains were entered to SiteExplorer, only one page was reported. Yahoo clearly knew about the other pages, since you could enter the URL for those pages and get a result. But putting the home page in resulted in only one page. I deduced that this meant the site was banned. Neither of the two sites placed anywhere in the top 1000 for terms they did well on in other engines, so I'm sure Yahoo was banning them.

Now I've noticed that SiteExplorer does show all the pages, but with noncapitalized page titles (other than for the home page.) This is a change and I have seen it only for these two sites that I think are banned. For other sites, SiteExplorer reports the page titles as listed on the page, which is usually with capitalization.

Senior member, crobb305, confirmed that he has seen some of this behavior recently as well. But he added that "for most others that are banned, only the homepage shows on a site: search."

So is this a new way Yahoo is handling showing banned sites or is this something totally different?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has a member stating that although his site was banned from Yahoo! Search and was denied reinclusion into Yahoo's index, he was still able to guarantee inclusion through Yahoo's paid inclusion program.

Yahoo's paid inclusion is now named Search Submit and it is a program that allows you to send Yahoo your pages, and if approved, Yahoo will guarantee to crawl those pages often, plus give you the ability to send them more meta data.

The major issue with being accepted into paid inclusion but being denied to the normal Yahoo crawl is that they both should follow the same quality content guidelines. Yes, the paid inclusion program has a set of content guidelines. But whatever is displayed within the search results have to meet Yahoo's overall quality guidelines.

The member explained the process:

1. Banned by Yahoo!
2. Made some changes
3. Given the opportunity to participate in Paid Inclusion, which you have to be good enough for regular inclusion to participate in.
4. Attempted regular inclusion...we were told NO.
5. Looking at Paid Inclusion again because we can advertise in the organic rankings with this product.

About a few weeks later, Yahoo actually included them back into the search index for free. The member said:

We have been miraculously reincluded and we are performing very well in the organic listings without paid inclusion!

As many people know, there is a gray line as to what quality truly is. Even within organizations, one person at Yahoo can review a site and consider it "good enough" to be included, whereas someone else can say it "just doesn't meet the requirements." Is this a case of that?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread report a spike in activity with Yahoo Search's web crawler, Slurp.

People have noticed a large increase in page hits and bandwidth usage, caused by Yahoo! Slurp recently.

I run several sites and I have the same problem. In fact, if Y! were to send me 1 visitor for every 10 bot visits I would need a dedicated server to handle the traffic :o)

i used to get like 4-5 at a time, but in the last few days it jumped like 8-10 and today it was an all time high of about 18 yahoo bots at a time. i havent checked the total of the bots/day but its surely going to be a larger number today

There are enough posts for me to report this, but not enough to say this is happening to a large percentage of site owners.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.