Yahoo! Search Optimization Archives

Several days ago Yahoo announced support for something called the common tag. In short, it basically gives developers a way to tag their content in a more unified way.

Vanessa Fox has the most detailed explanation of how this all works. In fact, Yahoo's post on the topic is almost unusable.

So please go skim her article and then come back here and let me know if you plan on giving this common tag a try. Personally, I doubt I will.

Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

BillyS, a senior member at WebmasterWorld posted that he thinks Yahoo Search might be updating now. BillyS is known for watching Yahoo Search pretty closely, but in this case, no one has come in to back his observation.

BillyS said:

Anyone else seeing some pretty big shifts on Yahoo? We normally get around 12% of our traffic from Y!, but today that value is closer to 18%.

I don't expect that value to stick, but I'm expecting some settling over the next several days.

I personally checked some of my traffic from Yahoo on this and some other sites and they don't seem to have jumped up or down that much. But I do not track Yahoo as closely as other SEOs.

Yahoo Japan recently updated, which may be a sign that Yahoo US will be updating any time. But no official word from the Yahoo Search Blog yet.

The last observed but not confirmed Yahoo update was towards the end of March 2009.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: This is now official, Yahoo posted about this "weather report" at the Yahoo Search Blog on June 2nd.

The Yahoo Search Japan blog announced they are updating their index now. Perhaps this is a sign that Yahoo in the US will update soon as well. I am pretty sure that both indexes are mostly separate for the most part, I am not sure if it works the same way at Google, but I think it does at Yahoo.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a single post about the update. One person who tracks Yahoo Search Japan said "we're experiencing big move on SERP."

The translated announcement reads:

Yahoo! In search, Yahoo! Inc. UEBUSACHIENJIN has developed the "Yahoo! Search Technology (YST)" has upgraded the search algorithm.

Recently we reported Index Update, unlike a significant upgrade and will affect the behavior of search engine algorithms.

The last US Yahoo Search update we reported was a while ago in March 2009.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been about a month since the February Yahoo Search update and we are now seeing reports of a new update.

Threads at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums have a lot of discussion around the changes at Yahoo. Like usual, Yahoo has not yet posted a "weather report", but I bet they will today or tomorrow.

There are some pretty heavy fluctuations in the Yahoo Search results and some are still update with how Yahoo is handling redirects. Outside of that, I hope you all have benefited from this update.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There seems to be a Yahoo Search update taking place now. A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the update. We do not have official confirmation from the Yahoo Search Blog yet, but we didn't have confirmation the last update either.

The first report came in early yesterday morning and since then, many others confirmed seeing an update as well. Let me pull out the key findings from the thread:

• Link counts may have dropped
• Some are reporting canonical issues
• One person reported "different titles and descriptions for singular vs. plural of my main keyword. It's the same URL, so kind of odd."

Why did Yahoo not announce this update? Well, maybe they will today or tomorrow. But the Yahoo Search Japan blog announced it the other day. It translates to:

Yahoo! In search, Yahoo! Inc. UEBUSACHIENJIN has developed the "Yahoo! Search Technology (YST)" has started a full update of the index.

The Index Update?

YST, every day to make a more user-friendly search engine, such as Japan's own and respond to the world stage and improve the work of Akira Osamu develop new features and functions. To reflect the results of this search engine, built-in indexer will update the entire index.
Position changes are expected to be improved with the results of this search. The full completion of the update takes a few days.

Yahoo! Search Project

The last update was a small hiccup on February 9th but a larger update was on or around January 19th.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: We helped coerce Yahoo to post weather updates again.

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

On January 19th we reported about a Yahoo update that many SEOs and webmasters took note of. The thing is, Yahoo never officially confirmed that shuffling as a update.

Now, I am seeing new reports of a Yahoo update at WebmasterWorld. Two different webmasters reported drops in their rankings. Here is what they said:

I have seen major drop down in my SE ranking for all of my keywords, even that my 9 out of 10 keywords were stable and holds top 10 position two days ago, but now they are no more coming under 50 results.

I've dropped about 8 positions from positions I've had since last October for the two main keyphrases I monitor on Yahoo. It looks like it happened late monday or early tuesday. Usually with Yahoo updates I tend to pop back up after a week or two.

So let's see how it goes and if things change or if Yahoo finally announces something.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Textex at WebmasterWorld is reporting that he is seeing both an Ask.com update and a Yahoo Search update.

He first noticed Yahoo Search changes yesterday afternoon, saying "Seeing movement." He was then backed up by full member, Vimes, who said, "I'm seeing something not sure if I'd call it an update just yet, the sectors i look at there is a shuffle." So this may be the beginning of a Yahoo update or it might be some sector tweaks. We are due a Yahoo update, the last one we noticed was back in November 2008, since then, there have been no confirmed Yahoo Search updates. So having an update now, would not surprise me.

On the Ask.com front, there is a bit more discussion going on, being that the update was reported at WebmasterWorld a bit earlier. Textex called this update "a complete overhaul." Full member, robzilla, confirmed but cautioned that this update doesn't seem to be "an improvement" to their index. Soon later, they both noticed that clearing their cookies reset the "results reverted back" to their previous state. This implies that the results might be a test on some users. I did some of my own testing and the results do seem a bit better. Still not what I consider "fresh" results, but a bit better on the few dozen results I check to see quality. This cannot have anything to do with Ask.com's recent announcement on NASCAR, so I wonder what exactly is going on here?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld on both Ask.com update and Yahoo Search update.

A newish patent application from Yahoo named Identifying excessively reciprocal links among web entities was filed on January 8, 2009. The patent inventors include Priyank Garg and Tim Converse of Yahoo, both well-known search engineers at Yahoo. Of course, we have an excellent and thorough explanation of that patent from Bill Slawski. We also have a write up from David Harry on the patent app.

Here is the abstract:

A method for identifying reciprocal links is provided. At a particular host, the set of hosts which link to the particular host and the set of hosts to which the particular host links are determined. The intersection and union of the two sets of hosts are also determined, and the sizes of the intersection and union are calculated. The concentration of reciprocal links at the particular host is calculated based on the sizes of the intersection and union. A ratio of the intersection size to the union size is used to determine the concentration of reciprocal links. The particular host's rank in a list of ranked search results may be changed as a result of identification of a high concentration of reciprocal links.

So I am not going to repeat the summaries of this patent app, for that, use the links above. There is a lot of discussion around it.

Threads at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld are starting to get their minds 'wet' with debate over the patent application. Of course, it is always important to remember that a patent or patent app does not mean a search engine is actually using the methods in the current algorithms, nor does it mean they are using it exactly like it is written in the patent.

Martinibuster adds a nice point in the Sphinn thread saying:

What's more interesting is the execution of how links are rewarded. Big difference between Yahoo and Google, with Google tending to favor the user experience and Yahoo seeming to focus on keeping spam out to the detriment of the search results.

Let's not forget that Google added the words excessive to their link schemes document a while back.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that folks are noticing that Yahoo Site Explorer has updated the link counts for the tool.

I do not typically track these numbers, but many do. So if you do, definitely take a look and see if you are doing any better.

Here is a screen capture of our most recent Yahoo Site Explorer link count:

The 250,000 value shows all links to seroundtable.com, excluding internal links, but to the entire domain. In contrast to Google Webmaster Tools, which only reports 175,408 links for this domain.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why does the site command in Google not match up in the number of "indexed" URLs reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A very valid question, let me show you.

A simple site command in Google for site:www.seroundtable.com returns 17,500 results. So that means, Google has indexed approximately 17,500 pages from the www of this domain.

Now, if I login and check my Sitemap data for this site (yea, I finally created a Sitemap file), it shows about half of the indexed URLs. It says Google has indexed 8,813 URLs of the 9,086 I submitted.

For me, the answer is simple. I seem to only sending URLs of the individual blog posts here. So although I have about 9,000+ blog posts at this domain, I still have about twice as many pages on this site, due to the categories, date archives, tag landing pages and so on. Those pages are not included in my Sitemap file. So Google seems to only showing the indexed URLs of what I submitted. Of course, it is hard for me to validate that by just looking at the numbers.

What I found interesting is when I went to Yahoo's Site Explorer, Yahoo told me they h have indexed 16,498 of my pages, but crawled only 15,022 pages and thus know about 16,498 of my pages. I guess via linkage data, they can index more of my pages then they actually crawl?

In fact, Yahoo's numbers for a inurl:seroundtable.com command is almost on target to the numbers they report in Site Explorer, which is nice.

In regards to what is going on with Google... I am not sure if the results are accurate or not. Tedster at WebmasterWorld said:

I'm never surpised when Webmaster Tools information seems peculiar in some way - it happens a lot. Also note that site:example.com results are getting weirder and weirder, often omitting urls that definitely are in the index - sometimes with a simple site:example.com/directory/ query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday I got upset that Yahoo Search Still Not Listening to 301 Redirects. Sometime yesterday afternoon, we were getting reports that this is now resolved.

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has the individual upset with how was handling those redirects in the past saying things are now looking better. Here is his post:

This seems to be clearing up on its own.

I no longer see the non-canonical URL in the links of Yahoo search results; The link in the SERPs is now correct. However, I do still see a non-canonical home page listing in Yahoo Site Explorer when "Show pages from: Only this domain" is selected.

I am happy to see this resolved or being fixed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is crazy already, we reported this time and time again. Yahoo Search is not always listening to a simple 301 redirect. We reported this in September and the issue continued to linger on month to month. In fact, many sites are suffering from good rankings in Yahoo, because of this canonical domain issue.

A new thread at WebmasterWorld shows the frustration. Two very senior members discuss the issue, saying they both have 301 redirects from the non www version to the www version. Because Yahoo indexed both, the site will likely be delisted from the index, according to one senior member.

Moderator jdMorgan, is the one having the issue now. He explained:

I just found out that Yahoo! has indexed a non-canonical version of one of my domains, despite the fact that this non-canonical domain has been 301-redirected to the canonical domain since inception.

So, despite a 301 redirect from example.com to www.example.com that actually predates the DNS going live ten years ago, Slurp has "inferred" this non-www domain and is now showing it and linking to it in their search result.

One member spoke to a Yahoo rep at a recent conference and the Yahoo rep told him he would look into it. I guess, he has not had the time yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: This seems to be being resolved, see the update here.

Many SEOs use the site command to see how healthy their site is in a particular search engine. So you plug in site:www.mydomain.com in a search engine and the search engine will return the number of pages they have indexed for that domain. If you know you have a hundred pages and the search engine indexed 90% of those pages, then you are pretty well off.

But the problem is, the site command is not often all that reliable. We had recent reports that Google is dropping pages and we had recent reports that Microsoft Live Search is dropping pages as well. Most SEOs determine a drop in pages indexed by the number of results returned by the engine for a site command.

But is this a valid way of really determining how many pages a search engine indexed of your site? From what I am hearing from search engine representatives at both Google and Microsoft, the answer is no. A webmaster should not depend on the number returned by a site command as a reliable indicator of the number of pages a search engine has indexed of their site.

Googler, JohnMu, wrote in a recent Google Groups thread three reasons why SEOs and Webmasters should not depend on this number:

• The previous approximation was incorrect, the current one is closer to the actual number of URLs that we have indexed or would show to users
• The previous approximation was close and the current one is worse than before (this can happen)
• A change in our algorithms (we make a lot of changes that will impact crawling, indexing and ranking -- for some sites perhaps more than for others)

At the same time, Microsoft's Jeremiah Andrick told me that it "is problematic to use the "site:" operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query."

That being said, how can you get an accurate number of pages indexed by a search engine for your site?

I know Google's Webmaster Tools has in their Sitemaps section a place to show you the number of pages submitted in your Sitemap compared to how many URLs actually indexed. So, this might be a better indicator, but I am nervous about this number, because way too often I hear of reporting glitches in Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to track each and every keyword phrase your pages rank for. Then see by keyword, not by site command, if those pages rank. This can be time consuming, but there are ways to automate this.

Overall, using the site command might not be the best way to determine how healthy your site is in a particular search engine. I know many SEOs use this as a factor, but maybe it is time we think again about this?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The Yahoo Search blog announced there would be an update over the weekend at Yahoo Search. The thing is, there are currently no comments at that Yahoo blog post on the update nor do I see many threads discussing any update at Yahoo.

We do have a WebmasterWorld thread talking about the announcement. Maybe one or two are noticing some slight changes in the Yahoo search results. Maybe Yahoo is updating and maybe SEOs have gotten to the point where they don't care? I hope not.

One member said that for his niche, Yahoo stopping mimicking the Google results. He labeled the update, the "Divorce from Google" update. This is what he said:

It seems they've dropped many of the Google manipulations they started in July especially in my areas. Wise decision on Yahoo's part. Let the good times roll. Commerce sites are coming back.

The last Yahoo update we reported was in mid-October and it didn't show up until a couple of days after the announcement. This November announcement was made on Friday, but still very little reaction.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread discusses a classic SEO challenge, passing link popularity for tracking URLs. Honestly, I cannot sum up the issue better than the original poster:

Our site uses query string variables in our URL's to track traffic and internal vist patterns. As an example our email offers our external ads will use a URL similar to: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345

And then upon entering the website they might click on internal links
like: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?sc=2332

Those Variables have the capability to combine: www.website.com/shop/scarfs.asp?cpn=bbl2345&sc=2332

Over time this has created millions of variables in Google's index.

How can this webmaster keep the tracking capabilities but at the same time, keep the link popularity to the main URL?

With Yahoo, they give you a tool within Site Explorer named Dynamic URL Rewriting. This tool allows you to tell Yahoo that these dynamic URLs really refer back to this main URL. You really do not have to do any coding on your site or server to communicate this to Yahoo. All you do it plug in the information into Yahoo.

With Google, it is not that easy. In Google, you need to make sure you set up your site and server to communicate this to GoogleBot. JohnMu, a Googler explain:

Assuming you want to keep track of those numbers, move them to a cookie and out of the URL. If you can do that, you could 301 redirect from the tagged URL (with the numbers) to a clean URL while setting a cookie on the user's side. In other words, everyone is redirected to the clean URLs and users can still be tracked appropriately. Of course, this involves changing a bit on the server side -- and depending on how much time you have it might be hard to get done anytime soon...

There are other solutions, but they don't work as well as this one.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced a "weather report," signifying a search update was taking place. No one really noticed anything, not until last night - at least.

Last night, I saw a post at WebmasterWorld reporting that the "Serp's are on the move." Member, Vimes, said:

any one else seeing the serp's move, from my location I'm seeing the weather start to change looks like I'm expecting bright spells with a little rain later ;)

No one else replied, nor do I see any other discussion in any of the search marketing forums I track. But Yahoo did tell us to expect changes a day ago:

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and 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.

Good luck with this update.

The last update we observed was around September 29th. Yahoo told me it was not an official update, the last official update was on September 6th - 9th.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Site Explorer seems to have pushed out their beta design to everyone now. The new look, is not just visual, it also contains these new data points:

+ Site URL
+ Number of pages known
+ Number of pages crawled
+ Number of host on this domain
+ Number of inlinks
+ Number of inlink domains
+ Number of outlinks
+ Number of outlink domains

Patrick at BlogStorm took notice to this update early this morning. Yes, it is now available to everyone to see by default, without having to go to the beta URL. Nice catch Patrick.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll on if you like the new design or not. I am not sure if the poll is fair, because the new design not only gives you a slightly new look, but also gives you new data - which everyone likes.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There are reports from WebmasterWorld that Yahoo Search is shuffling their search results. This is interesting, because we normally do not have a Yahoo Search update until the first week of the month.

The last update was on September 6th and we had one on August 1st. Maybe because the Jewish new year is tonight, maybe - they did the update early?

The thread at WebmasterWorld is pretty convincing, in terms of this being a real update. We do not have a "weather report" from the Yahoo Search Blog yet confirming the update. But I am sure it will come soon enough.

There is also a DigitalPoint Forums thread discussing a spike in traffic from one webmaster. Hopefully, you saw a spike in your traffic as well!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that several webmasters have noticed that even though they are redirecting their non www to the www version, Yahoo is still listing their non-www as the main result.

This comes even after months of redirecting the non www using a 301 redirect, permanent redirect, to the www version. Here are some comments from the thread:

www.example.com redirects to example.com and has done so for quite some time now. Yet when I do a search for a two word primary key phrase, Yahoo shows www.example.com. A search for my domain name returns example.com.

I was at #1 for a few years but lost some ranking in August for this search phrase. I'm not sure if the ranking loss is related.

Is it a backlink issue? Doesn't appear so:

I looked, and can't find any backlinks at all to non-www but the homepage shows up both with and without for different searches.

So what is going on with the latest Yahoo update? Good question.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am seeing major reports on a Yahoo Search update at WebmasterWorld right now. The timing makes sense, it is just about one month from the August 2008 Yahoo update. I would not be surprised if we see a post today or tomorrow at the Yahoo Search Blog announcing the update, which they call the "weather report," based Danny's request but I gave Tim Mayer credit.

This Yahoo Search update is fairly major. Senior member, BillyS, said:

Our traffic is up around 30% on Yahoo starting some time Friday night. Is anyone else seeing this too?

I've always been under the impression that Yahoo gives a lot of weight to a domain's age. We might just be hitting one of those threshold values - our site is nearly 5 years old now.

Others notice up to 50% more traffic from Yahoo.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo announced the update, a day later, as expected.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Yahoo Site Explorer has done a major update to their linkage data reports. Most webmasters are reporting huge drops in the number of links reported today versus the days before.

The linkage drops are reported as high as losing over 5,000 links. Others saw a drop of about 1,000 links and so on.

It is possible it is a temporary reporting glitch, but some are actually speculating that Yahoo is no longer showing links that are not counted, either nofollowed or simply not counted, in the linkage reports anymore. Right now, it is too soon to know for sure. But if anything changes or if more reports come in, I will do a follow up post.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Just wanted to add that we reported similar issues in March, where my link count then was 271,196 inlinks, but in October I had 216,880 inlinks, and now I have 247,183.

Yahoo conducted an update to their search engine over the weekend. We reported on the early discussion around the update and it then became official when the Yahoo Search Blog confirmed the update later in the day.

But since then, I have been hearing and reading discussion that the new Yahoo Search results are more like Google. And since Google tends to be the barometer of what is "relevant" and what is not, maybe Yahoo's search results are becoming more "relevant."

Yahoo Search moderator, travelin cat, at WebmasterWorld said:

We have never ranked in the top 100 results in Yahoo since their split with Google. Starting a couple of days ago, our site started showing up in Yahoo serps. Most of our kw phrases are now on either the first or second page.

Plus, we have a whole new DigitalPoint Forums thread on the topic of the Yahoo results being incredibly similar to Google results. Here is a select comment from that thread:

Did anyone noticed changes in Yahoo!' SERP today. Yahoo is following the same way as Google. Frequent change in Google SERP is kind of common now but it's new for Yahoo!. Yahoo! is changing search results very frequently now.

Not only are the results looking a bit similar, in some cases, the frequency of updates seems to be getting similar and the discussion has grown a bit around this update.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

We have substantial reports from webmasters and SEOs in both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums of a major Yahoo Search update.

This update was unannounced by Yahoo and has hit webmasters by surprise. The last update was on July 17th but that update was not as significant as this update appears to be. Here are some of the responses and reactions from webmasters.

Our site has lost about 30% of traffic

Many of my keywords that ranked #1-2 for years have dropped 10 spots or so.

Their last change is complete disaster. New SERPs prefer totally irrelevant, unimportant or simply just not the best sites. No wonder why they need help from Google or Microsoft to survive

Many feel that Yahoo will reverse these changes, at least at some level. But the update began two days ago and the changes are still noticeable.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo posted tonight that this is an official update.

A supporters-only WebmasterWorld thread (and now a standard WebmasterWorld thread) have discussion around the new look of Yahoo's Quick Links. Yahoo's Quick Links, which we first reported on back in 2005, and then again a year ago - is basically a way to give Yahoo's searchers a quick way to dive deeper into a search result, typically tied to navigational-like queries.

In the past, they looked like this:

Then Yahoo changed them in 2007, to look more localized:

But now, when you do a search for walmart in Yahoo, you see two types of Quick Links.

(1) The first looks almost identical to the style Google uses. Here is the new Yahoo version:

Compare that to the Google Sitelinks for the same search result:

Yes, very similar.

(2) But directly under the first Yahoo Quick Link, in position number two for a search on walmart is this, single link Quick Links:

This version is not labelled Quick Links, like it was in the past, but it looks more like a standard Yahoo Quick Link.

Google has gone through many implementations and layouts for their Sitelinks. So has Yahoo, but it seems they are now converging on a very similar design.

Is this a standard Yahoo Quick Link or can we attribute this to a new form or even maybe Yahoo's new Search Monkey version of the implementation?

You can find a bit more about Yahoo quick links via that link.

I hope to get more information on how these new Quick Links are being generated. Is it a standard Quick Link with a new design? Is it a submit pro version of the Quick Link? Is it a hand made Quick Link? Or is it a Search Monkey Quick Link?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (paid access) thread and WebmasterWorld (free access).

Update: A Yahoo spokesperson told me this has nothing to do with the SearchMonkey. He added, "we are increasing coverage for quick links as well as continuing to experiment for the best way to convey deep site links to our users."

Let me take you back a few steps before getting into this update. On June 30th, Yahoo announced an update that did not update any of the search results around that date. Several days later, around July 7th, webmasters began to notice a July Yahoo update. Now, I am seeing early reports of an additional Yahoo update.

The reports come from WebmasterWorld yesterday, saying that in the real estate niche, "80% of the sites" are no longer in the same position they were the day before. They have been replaced by "gov and org or small old sites," said WebmasterWorld member Garya.

Member, supafresh supported Garya's post by saying:

Yahoo changed today in my sector, we moved from the 3rd page to the first page. From my analysis a few days prior I think they tweaked the algorithm on template recognition.

Did you notice a change in Yahoo in the past twenty-four hours?

On the Google front, we continue to see yo-yoing, even today.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am not sure if this is new but it seems if you search in Yahoo for www.domain.com, Yahoo will return results as if you submitted a site command to Yahoo. For example, a search on www.seroundtable.com returns about 18,800, only from seroundtable.com.

If you conduct a true site command at Yahoo Search, i.e. site:www.seroundtable.com, Yahoo will automatically redirect you to Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo actually started redirecting these types of queries to Site Explorer almost exactly two years ago, today.

Has Yahoo decided using a simple www.domain.com syntax should stay on Yahoo Search and not be redirected to Site Explorer? Has Yahoo always returned a site command like result set for www.domain.com searches? I know Google does not return site command like results for a www.domain.com search.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Eric Enge Interviews Yahoo's Priyank Garg has an extremely detailed and educational interview with Yahoo's director of product management for Yahoo! Search Technology. Priyank Garg is a great guy - I have known him for the past couple years at least and as you can tell from this interview, he was very forthcoming with information.

We have two forums dissecting the interview, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at Cre8asite Forums. I'll isolate the main discussions around this interview in bullet format:

• Footer (bottom page links) may not be used for ranking purposes, but will be used for crawling and discovery
• Yahoo uses both human and algorithmic approaches to detect spam and fight spam
• Some spammy sites will still be included in the index but won't rank well, outside of navigational queries (like searching for the site's name)
• Yahoo doesn't automatically discount paid links
• Links in quantity are less important these days

Those are just some of the interpretations of the interview. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Cre8asite Forums.

When Yahoo Search announced the update on June 30th, it went very unnoticed, as if there was no update. But things have changed over the holiday weekend.

Starting on Friday, July 4th, in the morning, some webmasters began reporting fluctuations in Yahoo. Some are saying that more "anchor text" is making an impact. We do not have much discussion around the specific changes, only that people are actually noticing changes in the search results.

One member at WebmasterWorld said:

I lost 40 percent of my YH traffic two days ago and pages per visit plummeted to 1.2 for the remaining traffic.

If you have seen changes, join the discussion. Typically, with Yahoo Search results changes - things fluctuate and then they go back to a similar state they once were. In other words, we have seen many rollbacks from Yahoo.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The news that Adobe announced that Google and Yahoo are indexing SWF Flash files has overtaken the front page of Techmeme this morning. It is also the dominate discussion in all the major search forums.

In any event, Google and Yahoo is now able to crawl the textual elements within SWF files, including discovering links within those SWF files. The Google Webmaster Central blog discusses the details but here are the takeaways as I see it:

• They will crawl SWF files
• Only the textual components will be crawled
• FLV files are not crawlable
• If your Flash files are generated by JavaScript, you need to be careful because Google might not execute the JavaScript
• Google may index the external files your Flash file calls and won't associate them to the Flash files
• Google has issues with some languages in Flash files, specifically Hebrew language or Arabic languages

Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has a really good write up as well on the news.

Forum discussion at:

• Flash to be made visible by search engines., WebmasterWorld
• Adobe Help Ses Index Flash, HighRankings Forums
• Google Announces Improved Flash indexing, Sphinn
• Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content, Sphinn
• Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content, Digg
• Google's New Flash indexing algorithm, DigitalPoint Forums
• Improved Flash Indexing for Google (and Yahoo), WebmasterWorld
• New Google Algorithm For Flash, Cre8asite Forums

Update 07/15: Google has reorted an update regarding how it handles SWFObjects.

Yahoo has announced yet another Yahoo Search index update. Yahoo notified us that we "may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index." But as of this morning, no SEO has noticed any significant changes with their rankings.

In fact, there isn't much discussion around the Yahoo Search engine at all, right now. We have a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement, but all posts in that thread say no one noticed anything. We also have a Plurk thread where I asked if any one cares about the announcement, and the consensus is, no. No one cares.

The last Yahoo update was about a month ago, where the changes were very subtle to say the least. Yahoo typically conducts monthly search index updates and you can see all our coverage on those in the Yahoo SEO category at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Plurk.

It seems like some webmasters are becoming fed up with the activity of Yahoo's crawl, Yahoo Slurp, relative to the amount of traffic Yahoo Search is sending the web site. In fact, some webmasters have taken the plunge and banned Yahoo from crawling their sites.

It is funny, because some webmasters were or are afraid to ban Yahoo because they think it might have some sort of impact on their Google results. One such webmaster got over it and decided to ban Yahoo despite his fears.

There is a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the pros and cons. Some also wonder that will banning Yahoo have a negative impact on the Yahoo SearchScan & McCafee partnership and might have your site marked as harmful? I doubt it.

If you want to block Yahoo Slurp, learn how to at this page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A new WebmasterWorld thread has complaints that Yahoo removes the trailing slash from the URLs, possibly causing 404 errors on the receiving site.

This is not new, I complained about this issue back in 2004 and it is still an issue for webmasters today.

For example, let's say you have a URL that is www.domain.com/category/. Now, Yahoo will list the URL as www.domain.com/category and strip off the ending trailing slash. On some servers, if a 301 redirect isn't set up from www.domain.com/category to www.domain.com/category/ then the page will resolve to a 404 page.

This has frustrated many webmasters for a long time and now, WebmasterWorld moderator, pageoneresults, asked:

So, can someone explain to me why both Yahoo! and Live strip the trailing forward slashes off the display URIs in the SERPs?

But no one had an explanation. We just have people agreeing with the frustration over how this is handled.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Search typically does a search update once a month. Yahoo has announced last night that they have pushed out a new update that may result in "ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

Did we, the Search Engine Roundtable, miss early signs of this update? Possibly. I was tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld started by senior member, BillyS, who noticed a major traffic surge via Yahoo for a very short amount of time. On May 23rd, he reported major changes but then on the next day, May 24th, he said things were back to normal. I kept watching the thread but no new updates came about. Those were our early signs, but it seems not much came of it.

In the new WebmasterWorld thread, the only thread in the forums I track to discuss the update, only one member said she noticed changes. WebmasterWorld legend, Marcia said:

Haha! they *accidentally* put a site of mine at #8 out of 83 million (earlier today and late yesterday) and now it's sitting #9 out of 98 million pages returned. This update will be interesting to watch.

Trust me, it's an accident. ;)

That implies to me that Yahoo ranked a site that doesn't deserve to rank well.

The last Yahoo Search update, the Yahoo Tax Day update was much more visible then this one. But the March update was more like this update, where no one noticed anything much.

Is this a good thing? I.e. a good thing that Yahoo is making changes to their algorithms and index and at the same time, SEOs are not noticing those changes?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting a possible bug with the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.

The webmaster reports that when trying to delete the https URLs of his site from the Yahoo index via Yahoo Site Explorer, it tries to delete the http version as well.

As many SEOs and Webmasters know, having both the https and http version of the same content in the search results can hurt you a bit in terms of link equity. SEOs and Webmasters want to ensure that the links they obtain go specifically to one URL and not two, and since https is a different url then http, search engines may consider them as two different pages with exactly the same content.

So when some webmasters see that Yahoo indexed both pages, they may want to force the removal of one of those pages in Site Explorer. But according to this webmaster, if you try removing https, it will remove the http versions as well.

That brings up an interesting logical observation. If removing an https version, will remove the http version, then maybe Yahoo considers https urls to be the same as http. Maybe https://www.mysite.com/abc.html is the same as http://www.mysite.com/abc.html in the eyes of Yahoo. Maybe all links pointing to the https version are automatically moved over to the http version, in terms of the link popularity component used in Yahoo? Maybe... Or Maybe not?

Maybe, it is a bug in Site Explorer as one member suggests.

I've pointed out to Yahoo that http and https are just different protocols. They suggested that this was a bug in SiteExplorer.

I would think it is a bug and Yahoo doesn't treat https URLs as http.

The quick and easy fix, 301 the https version to http, if possible. But that is not always possible.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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.

There has always been this perception that links from domains with a .EDU TLD is better than links from .COM, .NET, .ORG and so on. Chris Boggs covered the debate with Are Links From .edu and .gov Domains Really "Better?" about a year ago.

Since then we gave tips on How Do You Obtain Links from .edu Sites? and even some wild things people have done for .edu links.

One good way of getting .EDU links is to see where your competitors obtained their EDU links. There are several ways to find such information. One way is to use Yahoo Search and conduct a link command search. For example, to find all the EDU links pointing to our domain, you can do [linkdomain:seroundtable.com site:edu] or a slightly different method that yields more results is [linkdomain:seroundtable.com -site:seroundtable.com inurl:.edu].

Those should return some of a site's EDU links.

You can always also export your links from Yahoo Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools and then do a filter on .EDU domains. I found about 45 EDU links within Google Webmaster Tools for this domain.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo's site explorer tool is a great tool to check your links as well as competitor links. A WebmasterWorld notes something fairly clear to most users of the tool, that Yahoo! seems to order the links in order of some quality metric.

Let's take a look at the inlinks to the home page of this site. The links consist from the Official Google Blog, the Yahoo Search Blog, Techmeme, Search Engine Watch Blog, Search Engine Land, OakWebWorks.com (a weird one), Ask.com Blog, Search Engine Blog, and then more links from the Google Blog. As you dig deeper into the links, the order may not seem to be so apparent.

WebmasterWorld senior member, SteveB said, "Yeah, the first batch have always included the most valued or whatever. However, #750 seems definitely not prioritized over 50,000 other links."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo! Search Blog announced last night that they have done an update. That update now appears to be complete.

We rolled out some changes to our index and ranking algorithm last night. So, as you know, throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages included in the index. This update should be complete very soon.

Watching threads over at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld make it easy to gauge the update as it happens.

While early on in the update, most of the members at DigitalPoint are praising the new results - the members at WebmasterWorld are calling the results "worse than the previous" state of results. As the update continues to go through, you notice less enthusiasm over at DigitalPoint Forums and more delight over at WebmasterWorld.

But many admitted that the results looked poor at the time and knew they would not stick.

It appears the new algorithm is done with its job and the new result set is out.

Now SEOs begin to analyze what they see and discuss it in the forums.

As a matter of noting the last update was considered a small update and took place on May 22nd.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

We asked the question in the past, Can an Email Address Be Counted as a Back Link? Well, maybe the answer is yes.

I was looking at Excel Diamonds backlinks in Yahoo! Site Explorer for fun and found that Yahoo! was listing an email address as a link. Well, kinda.

As you can see from the image below (if you can't see, click on it for a larger view), Yahoo is showing that they indexed an email address and they consider it a link. Why?

So I clicked on explore URL, exploring the email address, and it showed me there is a link from this email address at my personal blog.

So I clicked over and noticed, my client accidently put his email address in the location of the web address for when he commented.

So, technically, it is wrapped in an <a href=" but it is also linking to sales@excel and the @ symbol should make it invalid. However, my server people must have made it work, because when I try that URL in my browser, it works fine.

So, clearly this needs to be 301 redirected. But should Yahoo! know better? Nah, I'll take the blame for this.

Technically, Yahoo! is indexing a link and not an email address. So I have yet to see evidence of an email address that can earn link popularity.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread keeps lingering on since March 15th of this year. The topic is that some SEOs and Webmasters are asking why they can't seem to rank well in Yahoo Search. The same webmasters tend to be doing just fine in Google, but Yahoo won't show them any love in the search results.

There are literally dozens of reports of this in that thread. Plus I have received phone calls and emails to this nature from many people asking me why.

The simple answer is that Yahoo Search is a different search engine than Google. They rank pages differently. But for Google to rank a page within the top ten and for Yahoo to not rank that page within the top 100 - is there something wrong?

If so, wrong with who? Is Google too easy? Is Yahoo broken? These are the questions folks are asking in the thread. Most are blaming Yahoo for not being the most relevant search engine. But those are the same people who are not doing well in Yahoo; yes, a bias and conflict of interest.

So where do we go from here? Simple. If you really care that much, tell Yahoo. They need examples. Problem is, you cannot post examples in WebmasterWorld. So what can you do? I have created a thread just for you to post examples at our forums, submit it to Site Ranking Poorly in Yahoo But Well in Google and I will do what I can to get Yahoo to review those sites and give us feedback.

The only criteria is that you have to have a top ten in Google for that phrase and not rank in the top 75 at Yahoo for the same phrase. If those conditions are met, I will do my best to get Yahoo to review those threads. I can't force them, but I will try to encourage them.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld but don't post URL examples there. Post your examples at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A featured WebmasterWorld thread asks a good question, does rotating the content on a page hurt your search rankings.

You need to break this question down into how much content is being rotated in and out. If the whole page changes dynamically all the time, then it may cause a problem. If there are sections on the page that change on refresh, then it may not cause a problem. If the content on the page changes throughout the day, like a news site, then it wont cause much of an issue at all.

The big thing here, in my opinion, is to keep users in mind. Will it confuse your users to have the content changing all the time?

Imagine an e-commerce site with featured products on the home page. You can implement the featured products to dynamically rotate based on page load or you can cache the featured products to remain constant for a certain time period. If a shopper comes to your site and likes a featured product but then comes back and can't find it, it can be an issue.

On news sites or blogs, users understand that new content is added often. So users know what will be on the home page today, may not be on the home page tomorrow. Same with sites designed specifically to change on reload, like the Hot or Not web site (great viral site).

WebmasterWorld moderator, caveman, has a nice response:

There are lots of factors here that we don't have precise information on, but that's OK, because there is also a fair amount of existing knowledge out there about sites that constantly change content on the homepage, and for the most part, it just isn't a problem. IMO, Quadrille's point that this won't help in terms of strict SEO, is a legitimate one, but I never look at SEO anymore in that tight a context.

The reality is the the dominant search engine uses a very links based algo (they all do, really), so while I am a big believer in on-page optimization still mattering, let's get this in perspective...

The title of the page (most important onpage element) is presumably not changing, nor are important subheads, high level page text, and important site nav elements. If those things are not present, they probably should be (especially in this case). If those constant elements are present, and considering the importance of backlinks, the SE's have more than enough info to effectively rank the page.

Further discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday afternoon, Yahoo! announced support for a new attribute that Webmasters and SEOs can use on their pages to help aid the search spiders determine what content is the most important content on the page, by excluding extraneous or irrelevant content. You basically apply these elements to your page:

<div class="robots-nocontent">This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site</div>
<span class="robots-nocontent">This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page</span>
<p class="robots-nocontent">This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>
<div class="robots-nocontent">This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents</div>

This empowers Webmasters and SEOs to say, this is the most important content on the page and do not index the other content on the page. Specifically, this is a "nocontent" attribute, so you are telling Yahoo! this is not the main content on the page. Is this cloaking? No worries, Yahoo! specifically addressed that saying:

Note: Using a "nocontent" tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered "cloaking" because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike "cloaking" where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

Here is the page to Yahoo!'s help section on this new attribute, robots-nocontent.

Of course, Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on this tag. He explains that this won't prevent crawling because the search engine needs to crawl the page to see if this tag is there. In addition, this won't prevent indexing of the content because they need to index the parts you do not want to be searchable in the Yahoo! Search index.

Matt Cutts of Google found this release interesting and posted a comment at Danny's post with more questions. He asked:

Danny, can you ask how Yahoo intends to treat links in the "robots-nocontent" section? I could imagine:
- don't follow the links or index the anchortext with the destination document
- allow the links for discovery, but don't apply weight to the links or apply anchortext to the destination document
- links are treated normally in terms of indexing, anchortext, etc.
- other behaviors?
I'm sure Yahoo has chosen which behavior they're going to take with links in robots-nocontent sections, so I'm curious which way they decided to go.

I wonder if Yahoo! will answer Matt's SEO questions? Trade secret data, potentially Yahoo also does not want to tell SEOs this information, who knows. Maybe we will get an answer or maybe not, but excellent questions Matt.

Update: Matt's questions were answered by Priyank Garg of Yahoo at the comments of the Yahoo! post.

This new tag does not change any treatment of inlinks from the page. Links within the section marked with 'robots-nocontent' will be treated just like links in the rest of the page.

They will continue to be actually crawled to find the target page, but they will not carry link attribution if they have the 'rel=nofollow' tag.

To the forums...

Cre8asite Forums has a mixed reaction to this release. Bill Slawski says this is somewhat similar to Y!Q tagging. Softplus is worried about if people make mistakes with their code and accidently "break the closing tag or nest tags incorrectly." eKstreme said he isn't happy that Yahoo! went the "pseudo-CSS class" route, comparing this to the Google AdSense section targeting that "was comments based - nothing to do with the markup."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread tells the perfect story of someone who wants a page they own to be removed from the search engines.

One of my clients is an attorney and all of his partners have their own biography page on his website. One of the partners just left the firm and I removed her file from the server.

Now when her name shows up in the SE's, it's linked to a 404 error page I created, "Page cannot be found..."

My client doesn't want her name showing up at all in the SE's with a link to his website, even if it's to an error page.

With Google or Yahoo, there are ways to expedite the removal of the cache page and URL from the search engine. Recently, Google announced a new way to remove content from Google. You basically login to your verified Google Webmaster Central account and use the remove page tool. Yahoo also has a delete URL feature that allows verified site owners to remove URLs from their search index.

But the problem here is that this specific client, in the example above, wants the page removed from MSN Search. Microsoft has not given us a way to expedite the removal of a page or the cache results. Nor has Ask.com.

So what can a person do?

Softplus in the forums offers some suggestions:

(1) 404 the page, but that may take a pretty long time to impact the search results.
(2) Just change the content of that page and the next time Mr. Spider comes to crawl the page, the cache will be updated and the content you want removed will be gone.
(3) 301 the page to a different but related page.

Here are some other ideas:
- Block the page using a robots.txt command
- Add the nocache tag to the page

I personally think option two might be the quickest method outside of using a tool to remove the page, which is not offered by Microsoft of Ask.com.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Last week, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for them to find it themselves?

Softplus at Cre8asite Forums posted the URLs you can use to ping the various engines. Here they are:

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

I did not test these myself, but they seem accurate.

Note, there is no URL listed for Microsoft's Live search. Why? I suspect they currently do not support Sitemaps. Which brings me back to my lingering question, Is Microsoft's Live Search Ever Going to Add Sitemaps Support? They have been promising it since November 15, 2006.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Great news from yesterday at SES. Danny has a great roundup describing that Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery at Search Engine Land and I have some more details with my coverage of the Sitemaps & URL Submission session from yesterday.

In short, all four major search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com and Ask.com will all support an autodiscovery method for Sitemaps. Sitemaps is an XML protocol that enables you to freely submit a listing of URLs with more meta-data to the search engines, so that the engines can be assisted in their crawl process. It is like a form of paid inclusion without paying.

Sitemaps was first introduced in November 2006 but back then you had to manually go to Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo Site Explorer and inform them about your sitemap. Now, all you need to do is put a little marker in your robots.txt file, telling the search engines the location of your sitemap and presto, the search engines will find it on their own.

Microsoft and Ask.com both promised to support it, but I believe are currently not supporting it yet.

More details on these bot sitemaps (not human sitemaps) at sitemaps.org.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.

The Yahoo! Search Blog posted a weather report informing us that they are updating their search index.

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update will roll out this evening and will be complete very soon.

This must be a small update because I did not find any threads preceding the Yahoo! blog post on this. Typically, SEOs and Webmasters are able to spot the update, before Yahoo! announces it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

A search on google at Yahoo! Search confirms this to be true. In the past the results looked like:

Notice the category link, which links the search result directly to the category it belongs to within the Yahoo! Directory. Now that seems to be gone for all searches I tested.

Same with a search on search engine roundtable:

Old Result:

New Result:

I tried several different searches that I knew returned the category link within the listings, and all are gone. I do not know if this is on purpose, or if this is just a Yahoo! test.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The other day I took Another Look At Yahoo! "Quick Links" in Search Results. I said that some of the results in Yahoo! Search show what are called "quick links" with added links to the portions of the site.

After posting this information, we had a member come to our forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums and say that another way to get quick links is to participate in the Yahoo! Search Submit Pro program.

The member said:

Yahoo Search Submit Pro allows you to specify what quicklinks you want to appear under your ad.

After asking the member to expand on what he or she said, he/she added:

Search Submit Pro URLs have a redirect embedded in the search result. For example, a search for Sony turns up Sony.com as the first result, with a clickthrough URL that does not contain any redirect.

In contrast, the 2nd result is for SonyStyle, and has a clickthrough URL that contains a redirect through rdrw1.yahoo.com rather than directly to sonystyle.com which indicates this is a Search Submit Pro result. If you look at the quicklinks, e.g. VAIO Notebooks the rdrw1.yahoo.com redirect string appears again.

Not all quicklinks are the result of search submit pro though, for example Wikipedia entries frequently have Quicklinks. Further down the same search results page, you can see that result #6, the Wikipedia Entry for Sony, has quicklinks that do not contain the redirect. This might be because Wikipedia is an authority site, as previously theorized.

Chris Boggs also told me this is true. This, I find, to be an excellent reason to explore Yahoo! Search Submit Pro.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Back in September of 2005 we reported that Quick Links Added to Yahoo! Search Results. Based on a Yahoo! Blog announcement they showed off a walmart result that looked like:

Yes, this is very similar to Google's sitelinks but it appears Yahoo! has downplayed the Quick Links a lot.

For a search on walmart, now you get a link that reads Wal-Mart near you, taking you to Yahoo! Local. Back then, you saw they gave you a few Quick Links to store locator, online catalog and in-store now. Why did it change? Maybe based on their research, people only used the store locator link, so they figured to take them to Yahoo! Local instead of Walmart's store locator page.

A search on walmart at Google brings up sitelinks, but not really showing me things like store locator, which I would feel to be more useful then an electronics section.

So Yahoo! feels local results are what searchers want when they look for walmart, and Google feels searchers want to click deeper into a walmart department.

Back to Yahoo! Quick Links. Why did they change them? I still see "quick links" categorized for wikipedia results.

And also for some other type of searches, like group travel:

But what makes these happen? With Google, we believe it has to do with some authoritative status, plus a clear internal linking structure. What about with Yahoo!? I am not 100% sure.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Very early reports via WebmasterWorld about a possible Yahoo! Search link update. Funny that Google seems to be doing a link update today as well.

Anyone notice a charp reduction in backlinks? Mine have dropped from almost 6,000 to about 2500.

No idea why. I really hope 3500 sites didn't suddenly decide to stop linking to me :)

I've seen a sharp increase in backlinks today. I wonder if it will stick?

To check your back links in Yahoo!:

1. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
2. Enter in the domain name and click Explore URL
3. Click on the "Inlinks" link
4. Select from the drop down, "Except from this domain" and "Entire site"

I definitely see an increase for this site. On February 6, 2007 I documented I had 197,153 external links (except from my domain to entire site) and now I see I have 259,217 external links (except from my domain to entire site).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a screen shot, for the complete version, click here.

Had to share that, once I found it.

DaveN actually spotted this a couple days ago.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I wanted to squash a theory before it even gets out there, well, I may be a bit too late for that... As we know, Yahoo! Adds NOYDIR Support To Exclude Yahoo! Directory Titles in Yahoo! Search Results. And at the same time, there is a Global Yahoo! Search Index Update. But the two are not related.

The NOYDIR tag will have zero affect on your rankings.

Threads at both Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums have some people thinking that the new rankings they see have to do with this tag. They do not.

Tim Mayer commented at Search Engine Watch Forums saying:

The ranking changes are due to the index update and have nothing to do with the NoYDIR tag launch.

Tim

So if someone asks you, will it change my rankings. The answer is no.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums

Part of Yahoo! announcing they have added support for a No Yahoo Directory tag, Yahoo! has issued a weather report saying they need to do an index update for this NOYDIR to work.

Before the weather report was issued there was some recent chatter in a WebmasterWorld thread this morning on a Yahoo! Search update taking place.

I definitely see some major changes. The rankings seem to go back to the old results from late 2006. Which is good for the categories I watch. The update in January definitely had some spammy sites getting rewarded. So this new update is fine with me.

Yahoo! said:

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

This is probably why it took so long for NOYDIR tag to be released, it seems to have required a global update to all of Yahoo! Search properties.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

OR

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

Then next time Yahoo! Search crawls and indexes those changes (can be days or weeks or months) you will not longer see the Yahoo! Directory tag in the Yahoo! Search results.

Currently, my RustyBrick Yahoo! Search listing looks like this:

But my title tag reads:

Web Design, Web Development & Web Services New York, NY

Will I add this tag to my listing, I may or may not. I am in no rush.

Thank you Yahoo!

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Marcia posted a thread at WebmasterWorld informing us that Yahoo! Search is now highlighting the keyword search you have done, when you click on the cache link.

For example, if you search on search engine roundtable in Yahoo! Search and then click on the cache link under the top result, you will notice that the keywords "search" "engine" and "roundtable" are all highlighted in the cache results. Here is a screen capture:

Did Yahoo! every highlight keywords before? I am not sure if they did or not. There is a WebmasterWorld thread from November 2004 saying the Yahoo! cache does not have highlighted keywords anymore...

Marcia's posts:

I saw it for the first time yesterday evening. They're still not showing a cache date, but the words in the search term are now highlighted in bold, bright colors.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how Yahoo! ranks sites within the Yahoo! Directory. As I explained years ago with Yahoo! Directory Ranks Pages by Popularity, but let's look at an example close to home.

Yahoo! has a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Resources section, where they list out sites included in the directory in order of "popularity." Here is it...

What makes one site more popular than the next? Let's look at another example close to home. The Internet Consultants New York section has my business ranking number one, above Agency and Razorfish.

Let's analyze...

RustyBrick.com has 70,032 external links via Site Explorer.
Agency.com only has 7,782 external links via Site Explorer.
But Evolution.com has a whopping 152,059 external links via Site Explorer.

So why isn't Evolution.com number one?

Let's look at the SEO category:

Search Engine Watch has 213,437 external links via Site Explorer.
WebmasterWorld has 275,587 external links via Site Explorer.
SEOBook has 283,855 external links via Site Explorer.
Search Engine Roundtable has 239,111 external links via Site Explorer.

All about the same.

How does Yahoo! define popularity?

By default, Directory site listings are presented sorted by popularity and relevance. Sites that are most popular with users or the most relevant to the category appear at the top of the site listings. The order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology. If the category is large, the listings will display over multiple pages with pagination displayed at bottom of the page.

Sagerock at the WebmasterWorld suggest it is about click popularity. But I suspect it is a bit more detailed based on Yahoo! saying, "order of web sites or web documents is based upon Yahoo! Search Technology."

They can easily apply a popularity algorithm to the Directory and order pages by that. Now if we knew exactly how the popularity algorithm worked, then you know...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On January 19th we reported a Yahoo! Search Update was underway. Now, recent updates to that WebmasterWorld thread suggest that Yahoo! is rolling back that update, to the previous state.

On February 14, starting at message number 3252410, textex asked:

Seeing some rollbacks...anyone else?

Some are not considering this a rollback but a phase two of the update.

Exactly what is going on, I am not sure. I do not think this is a full new algorithm or index update. But there are substantial reports of changes taking place at Yahoo!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Middle of December we reported that Yahoo! said they would be adding support for a no Yahoo Directory tag, similar to the NOODP tag, by the end of this month.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has posted an update in the WebmasterWorld thread in message number 3238011 saying it has been delayed but they are still working on it.

Update: This is still in the works. I will provide a revised ETA in the near future. Tim

The update is greatly appreciated, and we have faith that it will be coming soon. Hopefully in February?

We broke the news originally with Yahoo! To Add No Yahoo Directory Tag on October 26, 2006.

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

As, I reported yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they launched new features for their Site Explorer Tool. As an FYI, Site Explorer went live September 29, 2005, it was the first of its kind, until Google came out with Sitemaps, followed by a name change to Google Webmaster Central. (Google Sitemaps came out first, sorry for the mistake, I guess I am losing it. :))

The features Yahoo! added includes:

• Site Authentication using META tags
• Detailed Authentication Errors
• Delete URLs
• Site Explorer Badge

The first two are cool. The last one, Site Explorer Badge, we spotted and reported on yesterday, before they announced it.

Delete URLs scares me a bit. As soon as I heard, I changed my Yahoo! ID password to something more secure.

All you need to do is login to your account (or someone elses) and click the delete URL. I didn't try it, but I would hope there is an added layer of confirmation. Maybe a requirement to add a meta tag or something to confirm it, or maybe an additional confirmation email to a non-Yahoo! email account?

In any event, I would change my password on my Yahoo! account, so maybe you should think of that.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo! explains a bit more about the delete URL feature:

If I use Delete URL, do I also need to use Robots.txt? Yes. Once you've used Delete URL to remove a URL from our index, we recommend using robots.txt to exclude the content from being added to out indexed again. Robots.txt excludes Yahoo!'s crawler (Slurp) from re-indexing your content. A robots.txt exclusion rule reduces the number of pages Slurp will read from your server. It also helps you save bandwidth on your website. Note: Site Explorer Delete URL service facilitates the quick removal of your URL from our index and is helpful when a URL that you have excluded, continues to show up as a thin document, but it may not prevent our crawler from continuing to crawl the URL again. It is not an alternative to using robots.txt.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yahoo! Site Explorer, Yahoo!'s Webmaster tool that details your index count and link count for your pages and site, has released badges. These Yahoo! Site Explorer Badges can be placed on your site to promote how many links you have to a page or to the site overall.

Here is what it looks like in real time:

Links to Site

I find it weird that Yahoo! is offering this badge. Just doesn't jive with what a search company should want SEOs or webmasters to promote. But I can be wrong - something just doesn't sit well with me on this.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums - thanks Kevin.

January 15th, Ben reported that Yahoo Search Replacing Site Titles in Search Results Listings, and then on January 17th, I dug into it more with Danny to come up that we believe the titles were from anchor text, specifically internal anchor text. In any event, Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has commented at our site saying it will be fixed tomorrow (i.e. today).

We launched a fix to the issue with lower case titles coming from anchor text. You should notice some changes tomorrow. Tim

After a quick check of one of the results that had this issue, i.e. a search on searchbliss, the number one result no longer is pulled from anchor text.

Before:

After:

Thanks Yahoo! for fixing that! What exactly was happening? We have not received official confirmation on our theory.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld post shows two respected members reporting that they have seen Google AdWords URLs within the Yahoo! Search index.

vicyankees says:

Is anyone else noticing that Yahoo is picking up Google Adwords links? I only know because i append all of my Google and other PPC links with a src=#*$!X and my tracking software also appends similar information.

WebmasterWorld moderator, bill, confirms this saying:

I just noticed this as well. I hadn't checked my Yahoo SERPs in a while and just noticed that they indexed several of my AdWords pages. What's up with that? I guess the first question would be, 'how do we get them to stop it?' Do I have to change all of my AdWords tracking codes?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It appears from the forums that we have early reports of a big Yahoo! Search update underway.

WebmasterWorld moderator, Sugarrae posted a thread at WebmasterWorld saying;

I'm seeing very big changes in the index this evening... looks like a big update in backlinks and some very big shifting in the serps for the areas I track. Also, that whole title change thing looks like a plague spreading through the web at the moment.

No official confirmation yet from the Yahoo! Search Blog but we typically beat Yahoo! to posted about their own updates.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

Confirmed: Yahoo! posted at the Yahoo! Search Blog a weather report confirming the update:

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began last night and should be complete very soon.

Keep the feedback coming!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

A WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums threads are both reporting issues with Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo!'s Crawler) indexing pages they should not be, and in quantities that may be harmful.

It appears that only specific bots are not obeying the robots.txt file and indexing pages are rates that can potentially cause server issues.

The specific IP addresses appear to be in the 74.6.x block. They do reverse DNS to inktomi, which is correct.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Let me start off by saying, I am having a really hard time finding juicy threads this week and this morning, I am digging really deep, but still can't find good ones. It must be the holiday season...

Two posts, with no one backing them up, are reporting shifts in Yahoo! search results.

The first is an update to a WebmasterWorld thread, a post yesterday, post number 3201071. He says:

Beginning today, my referrals have soared... up about 8X... looks great for me!

The second post is from SEO Refugee from the day before, saying;

Something Happened At Y Yesterday for me it would seem because Y is suddenly very fond of one of my sites that it was previously ignoring up until yesterday... or maybe this is some sort of isolated flukey ... anyone else seeing some super-tremendous Y movements?

Honestly, I doubt this is a major update. Just some changes to some individual sites, IMO.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & SEO Refugee.

I'll keep looking for threads, but if I can't find, it will be a slow day...

A WebmasterWorld sparked this post from me. At SES Chicago '06, during a session named CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines the search engine representatives were asked about how they handle CSS.

It is currently easy to hide text using CSS, everyone knows it. But do people do it?

Back to the SES session, on this panel were search engine reps. Many of the search reps were new to conferences and were not necessarily prepared to get certain questions. It all started when a Yahoo representative told the crowd to open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it. Then Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack.

Now, if you know Yahoo! and specifically Google, they typically will never say that they will be doing anything in the future. They typically first do and then tell, but not tell and then do.

All the search engines, except for one, I believe (but I forgot if it was Ask.com or MSN) said that you should not block your CSS and JavaScript files from the search engines using your robots.txt, just in case they want to take a peak.

I am honestly still confused by that statement. Well, if we block it, will it raise a red flag? If it raises a red flag, will you manually peak? Are you going to algorithmically crawl those files and look for problems if we keep them accessible to you? If we format something a certain way, but it may appear like spam, but in reality it is not, will an automated ban come on the site?

Personally, I am not worried. But these types of responses, by the search engines, can fuel a lot of questions and unnecessary worries.

As pageoneresults says in the WebmasterWorld thread:

Google has a hard enough time now dealing with html/xhtml. Parsing CSS files and determining whether something is hidden or not is not a solution. Now the bot would need to determine why that CSS exists. There are many valid uses of display:none or display:hidden.

For those who may be hiding things through CSS or negatively positioning content off screen to manipulate page content, I surely wouldn't do that with any long term projects. ;)

The penalty for getting busted using this technique I would imagine is a permanent ban. No if's, and's, or but's, you're history. You'll need a pardon from the Governor to be reconsidered for inclusion. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Back on October 26th, we reported Yahoo! To Add No Yahoo Directory Tag. Since then, it has been very quiet on the Yahoo! front for this topic.

Finally, Tim Mayer of Yahoo! replied to the questions as to when it will happen.

He said in a WebmasterWorld thread, in post number 3189985:

We are planning to do this in the near future. It is in progress. I will check if this will go into the next update happening in January.

So, the last Yahoo! update was on December 11th, so hopefully early to mid-January we will see this new feature.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Yahoo!'s cache is mishandling the <SUP> </SUP> (superscript) HTML tag. The superscript tag basically looks like ^this, often used for adding comments¹ numbers for reference or other characters to words.

Yahoo! Moderator, jdMorgan, confirmed this as an issue;

In your case it was the </sup> closing tag that got changed to HTML character-entities. In my case, it was the opening <sup> tag. Because of this difference in our applications, it looks like a problem handling <sup>s nested within other tags.

So that's a confirmation of what appears to be a fairly straightforward bug.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

On March 18, 2004, Yahoo! released what they called Yahoo! Web Rank. Yahoo! explained it as follows:

Yahoo! Web Rank is the name that Yahoo! has given to a technical measurement of a particular URL's popularity. If you choose to enable the Yahoo! Web Rank feature on the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, a toolbar icon will display the Yahoo! Web Rank value of each URL that you visit. The Yahoo! Web Rank values range from 1 to 10. This feature is currently in Beta release.

That page that described it used to be at http://help.yahoo.com/help/companion/webrank/ but now that page redirects.

You can take a look at the Wayback Machines copy of it from April 1, 2004. Lots of good old details on it.

Even Danny Sullivan wrote a huge write up on it at Search Engine Watch back on April 2, 2004.

Where did it go? Why did Yahoo! stop using it?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A huge topic at the SES conference last week was duplicate content. The definitions and how search engines handle duplicate content has changed a lot over the past few years. So that is why I dated the title of this post.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses just that.

In short, duplicate content is not a penalty. It hasn't been that way in years.

When you have 20 pages of the same page of content, a search engine will do their best to pick the best page on your behalf and filter out the remaining pages.

Why? The search engines do not want the same page in their index more than one time because it wastes resources and provides a bad search experience (showing the same result twice is not good).

So search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com) all try to pick the best page (one with cleanest URL, most links, etc.). But if they pick the wrong URL (not the best page, in your opinion) then you may consider it a penalty, when it is not.

This is why you should help the search engines out by using 301s and robots.txt files to tell the search engines which pages are the important ones. With Google you can also use Sitemaps and increase the priority score of the important pages, relative to the others.

So it is your choice: Let the search engines choose for you or you make the choice.

Forum discussion Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo! Search is currently undergoing an update. If you noticed your rankings shuffle around, it is true. A WebmasterWorld thread first spotted these changes yesterday morning.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! said;

There will be more changes tomorrow. Things should settle on Wednesday Tim

So a relatively quick update. Keep an eye out for what was changed.

Oh, let me note, if Google did an update now, they would be nailed up against a wall for messing around during the biggest shopping season. Hence the denial of the update, which some say happened and Google says did not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

The rel="nofollow" was introduced by the search engines back in 2004 (I believe). Since then we have not had a clear understanding on how exactly each search engine treats them. Some speculate that the rel="nofollow" means that the search engines won't crawl those links. Some say they will crawl them but they won't pass the link on as a vote for the web page it is linking to. Some say the link is completely hidden to search engines.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread shows that confusion in action.

One person said;

I just checked backlinks of one of my sites on yahoo site explorer and noted that the first site being shown in the results is a site which has my link with a "nofollow" attribute.

Does this mean that yahoo doesnt care about rel="nofollow"? Can anybody else check and confirm this from their own sites? And what about MSN?

Others noticed the same thing with Yahoo!

The response that seems to work for him is;

Technically, rel="nofollow" does not mean the search engines won't spider the page. They will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel="nofollow" means is "don't trust the link", i.e. don't pass PageRank/TrustRank, etc.

The robots meta tag "nofollow" is different, and really does mean "don't follow links from this page", and has nothing to do with backlinks or PageRank.

That works, but a clear definition from each search engine would be nice.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is also a thread from the Google's perspective that is currently active at WebmasterWorld.

Last month Google, Microsoft & Yahoo! Back SiteMaps Protocol, so it makes sense to begin converting your sitemaps to one standardized file. One such webmaster did that, submitted the new file to Yahoo! and claimed that Yahoo!'s Site Explorer dropped half of his pages from the index.

A WebmasterWorld thread has more details;

The day after switching to the new sitemap.org protocol recognised by the big three, our Y! siteexplorer interface showed a 50% reduction in pages listed in Y!

This was confirmed with a site:domain search two days later.

So he switched back and hopes that it will now soon fix itself. Why did it drop by 50%? Well, the webmaster believes; "because he used the identical urls in both sitemap versions, only changing the protocol of the sitemap."

I have no confirmation from Yahoo! on this as of yet.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I am pretty sure this is not new, but just in case it is... Via WebmasterWorld, Yahoo!'s Alta Vista and AllTheWeb are now showing different results when compared to Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld Member, beren, said:

For the past year or two, AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com have produced the same results as Yahoo.com for a given search. Today, they don't. AltaVista.com and Alltheweb.com still show the same results as each other, but they are different from Yahoo.com. I tried several searches on terms I don't usually monitor. In each case, the results were different.

Could it be that Yahoo is using alltheweb.com and altavista.com as a test search site?

Could be...

Some history for you...

Very early 2004, Yahoo! was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which an engine they bought earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo! Search.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The question at a WebmasterWorld forum is does registering your domain name for 10 years, instead of one year, help you rank better in Google?

Reading the thread, it appears that most senior members in the thread, feel that it does help.

Here are the arguments to register your domain name for an extended period of time:

(1) Shows the search engine that you are here to stay
(2) Google has a patent application that looks at this data (doesn't mean they use it)
(3) Secures your domain for an extended period of time
(4) Lower price per year if you register over an extended period

Seriously, anyone who is serious about their domain would not flinch at making the small investment of registering for an extended period of time. There is honestly, not that much to lose. There is a lot of back and forth in the forums about why people should not, but I personally disagree with all the arguments. So it costs an extra $30 to transfer the name to a new registrar, it is not the end of the world.

I am off to see when my domains expire, of course I have them set to auto renew, but at what yearly renewal schedule? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brett Tabke posted a thread at WebmasterWorld showing that the SiteMaps Protocol is backed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

This was announced at the WebmasterWorld PubCon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks, how do you know if a search engine has penalized your site?

With most engines, the quickest method of checking that is to see if the engine has you in their index. How do you do that? Just do a site:www.domain.com command. Examples of those searches for this site:

• site:www.seroundtable.com at Google
• site:www.seroundtable.com at Yahoo! (redirects to Site Explorer)
• site:www.seroundtable.com at MSN (Live.com)
• inurl: www.seroundtable.com site:www.seroundtable.com at Ask.com

If no pages are found, you can assume something is wrong. If your site is very new, less than a month or so, then just wait and be patient (get more links). If it is Ask.com, they take longer than a month to get indexed. But if your site is old and it once was indexed in the search engines and you do not have any pages indexed now, then it may be a sign of a penalty.

If you exclude all site technical problems, the next thing you might want to do in Google's case is sign up with Google Sitemaps. They may show you enough detail to explain that you are banned and why... Or they may not.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Thursday night, last week, the Yahoo! Search Blog wrote Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) - Supporting wildcards in robots.txt. I am honestly a bit shocked by the SEO community's response to this, or lack thereof.

I have spotted two threads on the topic, both just threads that say, that Yahoo! announced it and nothing more. I know this is something Webmasters have requested in the past and that they have looked down upon Yahoo! for not supporting until now.

The two additional parameters include:

You can now use '*' in robots directives for Yahoo! Slurp to wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL.

You can now also use '$' in robots directives for Slurp to anchor the match to the end of the URL string.

More details at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-02.html.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports by several members that they have recently noticed a huge increase in the reported number of links by Yahoo's Site Explorer.

Reports such as from 6,000 links to 15,000 links.

I am not sure if this is a bug or an upgrade or what.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo's Site Explorer is a very powerful tool for both competitive intelligence as well as to help your site in the Yahoo! Search index. Yahoo! Stores are now able to easily authenticate their site in Yahoo! Site Explorer, so they too can benefit from the features:

• Find which sub-pages within a URL are indexed by Yahoo!.
• Find pages that link to that site or any page. (inlinks)
• Submit and track feeds for your sites.

The Yahoo! Search Blog announced this new feature last night. There are more details at the Yahoo! Store Blog and a how to here.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Outstanding news, Tim Mayer from Yahoo! has told us via WebmasterWorld that Yahoo! is working on a No Yahoo Directory Tag, to compliment their recent support of NOODP Tag for Yahoo! Search.

Tim said;

Yes we are working on it. Will let you know when it is ready. What do you think is the right approach a different tag or should the NOODP tag apply to both YDIR and ODP?

I personally thing they should use a different tag for YDIR, gives us more control. But I think Danny Sullivan disagrees and thinks it would be easier just to use one META Tag for all.

Add your two cents to this decision at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

The Yahoo! Search Blog announced support of the NOODP tag, which enables site owners to tell Yahoo! to not display the ODP title and description in the Yahoo! search results. This is a direct response from webmasters communicating in the forums that they want Yahoo! to support it. In addition, on October 10th, on the Search Pulse, I got confirmation Yahoo! To Add NOODP Tag Support But Not No-Yahoo-Directory Tag Support from Tim Mayer. Tim and I spoke on the 6th edition where he promised it within weeks, and it is now done.

We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the 'NOODP' META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight's weather update.

We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"

or

META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP"

If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo! Search moderator, martinibuster, at WebmasterWorld reports a lot of changes in the rankings at Yahoo! Search. Some say it is a reversal of the Oct. 6th Yahoo! Update, but it doesn't appear that way to me.

There is currently no Yahoo! Search Weather report, but it may come soon.

I'll keep you updated if I get more information.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion on how Yahoo!, like other search engines, is able to locate and index sites that have no links to them. The weird thing appears that these sites not only are found, any many sites can be found through many different means, it is that they happen to rank for their own site name.

I wish I had more specifics, but since the last Yahoo! Search Update things at Yahoo! have been a bit weird.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

It has been over 24 hours since the most recent Yahoo! Search Update and some of the threads have been getting some traction. All in all, it appears to me that the Yahoo! update was a step backwards, from what I read in the threads. How do I know? Let's forget any of my own sites and just look at a WebmasterWorld thread.

You have those who are happy about the changes, but they all say something similar, I'll quote one.

wow great update i got like 30-40% of traffic income really nice i like it

In short, those who have sites ranking well now are happy, of course. The best sites are ranking well in Yahoo! Or are they?

Senior member steveb says;

Call it the groups.google.com update. This stuff should have been purged three years ago.

You have some calling this update the MSN Search update because the results appear to him to be easy to game.

Yes, we are seeing a lot of shifts. Did yahoo recently hire anyone from msn? Results are looking more like msn's

All in all, I think from what I see in this thread, that the Yahoo! update was a step backwards.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Late last night, Yahoo! announced a new "Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update." They said;

Welcome to our first weather report of the fall season. We are rolling out an index update tonight. As usual, you'll see some changes in ranking along with shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

What I find very surprising is the lack of forum discussion on this update. Maybe no one noticed much of a change in rankings or their traffic. There is no discussion of this update at Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld or Search Engine Watch Forums.

The only discussion I found was at DigitalPoint Forums and that is only discussing how Yahoo! wrote a post about it at the Yahoo! Search blog.

I believe I see some changes, which makes me think, why are the forums so hush hush about it? It is like Ask's forums, not to knock on Ask.com or anything. :)

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Last night on the sixth edition of the search pulse Tim Mayer came on the show to remark on my Request To Yahoo! To Add Support For No Directory Tag. He said that in about a week, Yahoo! like Google and MSN will support the NOODP tag that enables a webmaster to tell the search engine not to use the description from the ODP directory.

Now why would Yahoo! implement this?
(1) Yahoo! does sometimes use the ODP description in the SERPs.
(2) It has already been set up as a standard meta tag.

Why didn't Yahoo! commit to releasing a version to opt out of using the Yahoo! Directory title in the SERPs?
(1) Tim said their alogirtms are good at figuring out when and when not to use the title
(2) Tim said, they don't want to create yet an other meta tag without really needing it

The deal is I still want them to create this tag, because as Danny showed me last night, a search for tony knowles still has the same issue Danny pointed out here. So I believe there is still a need for the Yahoo! Directory meta tag.

This is a move in the right direction, so thank you Yahoo! for taking a step forward here.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

I pleaded with Yahoo in the past to Please Enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag, and I am doing it again. It is especially important now, that Yahoo! adds support for this tag. Webmasters are confused, they think that because Google and MSN (Live.com) support a tag to force the engine not to use the ODP directory tag, that Yahoo! would support the same.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows several web site owners complaining that Yahoo! forces the Yahoo! Directory title in the search results.

It really sucks that they do that and the listings are so bland and one simply cannot change anything with them...we have tried to get them to change our listing, but they NEVER answer. That is highly irritating.

It is sad that you pay to get listed in the Yahoo! Directory and it can have a significant difference in your click through rate on your organic results.

More details at Yahoo! Please Enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo! has now added support for the NOYDIR tag, more details here.

Extremely weird, conduct a search at Yahoo! for Google and right now, what comes up is google.com but with the title that reads, "Elisha Morgan Gemologists." The click does take you to Google but still, the title is not Google's title. In fact it belongs to this site listed in the Yahoo! Directory.

Here is a picture for proof.

So weird. You will notice that www.emgemologist.com, the site that's title is displayed, goes to google.com.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog wrote his Final Word on the Yahoo! Directory, saying the $299 per year for the listing is well worth the money. I tend to agree, I feel that the listing does add some level of trust to your organic results, be it Google, MSN or Yahoo!

There are some down sides to having the listing, if they screw up your title in the Directory, then you are stuck with it not just for the directory, but also for your the listing in the Yahoo! Search results. That is why I am still pleading with Yahoo! to please enable a No Yahoo! Directory Tag, I assume one day they will - maybe part of Yahoo! Site Explorer.

WE have also seen evidence that a listing may not be automatically removed after one year. Earlier this year, we had reports that Yahoo! Directory Listings Last Longer Then a Year for good or bad. If for some reason, a person find the Yahoo! Directory page, and you have a high popularity rank, you can outrank some of your competitors on that long list, because Yahoo! Directory Ranks Pages by Popularity. Heck, I am number three on the main category I am listed on, and I am number one in the New York region, outranking huge Web consulting firms like Agency.com, Razorfish, and others.

There were also loopholes to getting into the Yahoo! Directory, but if that doesn't work for you. There is a guy at DigitalPoint Forums who is guaranteeing listings in the Yahoo! Directory for only $60 and yes, people have been saying that this guy is delivering.

So the final word on the Yahoo! Directory, I agree - it is worth it, especially for $60.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

As we state time and time again, vertical creep into the search results are becoming ever more so important each and every day. This time, we see a Threadwatch thread with a picture of Yahoo! Answers being added to the search results in a much bigger way then normal.

Here is the way it looks now for a search on beer:

Here is the way it looks from a screen shot at Threadwatch, both are placed directly under the main organic results:

I personally like the current state of integration, but the second picture does stand out a lot more.

Forum discussion at Threadwatch.

Yahoo!, please enable a method of requesting that you do not display the Yahoo! Directory title in the search results. I mean, I know I like my title, because it is cute, but still, I rather the title listed in the search results pull from my title tag, or at least have an option to define that.

We won't think that you are being a copy cat, I am sure we will praise you like we praised Google and MSN. Your brothers each enabled the NOODP tag, that allows a Webmaster to tell the engines, no matter what, please do not use the ODP title in the search results. MSN implemented the tag on May 22, 2006, they were praised for it and Google implemented it on July 13, 2006 and they were praised for it.

We will praise you for implementing a NOYDIR tag or something like that.

It is the difference between showing:

Versus this:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are some early reports of a Yahoo! Search update or algorithmic change. A WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums thread have reports of shifts taking place. Of course, you see that those posting, currently at least, are unhappy with the result sets.

To me the results seem fairly static from where they were last week. But that is only for the few keyword phrases I looked at.

There are no "weather reports" posted at the Yahoo! Search Blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Matt Cutts from Google started his blog about a year ago. As soon as he started it, he has drawn an immediate fan base of active readers and participants. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! had a blog long before, since June 2002. Jeremy has a huge following as well but a different following from Matt.

Matt focuses most of his blog posts on helping out Webmasters and SEOs with Google.
Jeremy talks mostly about what he wants to.

Matt posts instructional videos on SEO topics.
Jeremy posts recaps of his instructional flight lessons.

Matt announces Google data center updates.
Jeremy announces new jobs open at Yahoo! within his department.

Matt geeks out on search algorithms.
Jeremy geeks out on MySQL optimization.

Matt has been focused on search related topics since being with Google in 2000 (or so.
Jeremy has jumped from division to division at Yahoo!, not always focusing on search related topics.

Is Jeremy the Matt of Yahoo!? I would not compare the two. Yahoo! has Tim Mayer, who is more up Matt's alley, in terms of communication. But Tim is not an engineer. Jeremy is a blogger but is not that focused on search. There are those who work under Tim and speak at the conference, but they don't have blogs. Of course they blog at the Yahoo! Search Blog, but not at their own personal blogs.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a Cre8asite Forums discussion on having two sites on the same niche topic, residing on the same server, with the two domains resolving to the same IP address. Let me quote EGOL on this;

This is based upon observations of just a small number of sites. However, I am thinking that if you have two powerful sites competing for the same KWs and under the same ownership that google might show only one of them at a time. The sites I see in my SERPs that fit this will alternate in and out of the SERPs for the same KW one in and one out, occasionally both showing.

Backing EGOL up is the Site Admin at Cre8asite, Ron Carnell, who says;

I agree, Egol, and believe it's been that way for at least two years. However, to fine-tune that thought, I don't think it's so much the same keywords as it is the same "solution" (theme might be a more recognized word, but is still too broad). Naturally, keywords and theme often converge, but sometimes they don't, so it's a useful distinction (and may account for some of the exceptions you've seen?).

Some more good and even cute advice in the thread.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

This should be an interesting session, Danny Sullivan is moderting this session. We have Jon Glick, ex-Yahooer now at Become.com, also have Bill Atchison, Dan Thies, Rajat Mukherjee of Yahoo and the new famed Vanessa Fox of Google. Brett Tabke is on my right, talking with Jon now about bad bots. Tim Converse is one row behind me on my left. Danny mentioned Brett's fight with bots and had Brett wave at the crowd.

Jon Glick up first. Robots are good at finding links and pulling that content. Bots pull the content but don't do the analysis. Bots are dumb, finicky and they cannot type. Bot friendly sites includes hypertext navigation, well ordered-hierarchical site and clear instructions in your robots.txt. Robot traps include; dynamic content, excessive parameters, and perpetual calendars. Use a robots.txt file to tell the bots what to or not do on your site. You can also used meta tags on a page by page basis, or you can also use the rel nofollow attribute. Well-behaved bots obey the robots.txt file and metatags, they identify themselves (they dont spoof), they dont crawl too aggressively, they provide FAQs, etc. When bots go bad, the most evil bots don't obey the robots.txt and metatags info. How do you detect these? look at your daily logs, do some real-time analysis. Dealing with misbehaving bots; don't hesitate to block them, sometimes just do a 24 hour block, block at the firewall level. You can also try put up a challenges, such as a text code in an image. Be careful who you block; track who gives you traffic.

Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs. Duplicate content is the same content presented on more than one URL. Most web sites do this to themselves. There is also near duplicate content also. There is a difference between filtered from the index and filtered from the search results. Duping yourself; duplicate URLs, shopping sites and near empty pages. Getting Duped; by screen scrapers, RSS feeds and proxy URLs. The impacts on traffic... 10 - 15% of traffic is organic search. After de-duping the site, 20 - 25% came from organic search. Revenue drop was "feelable." Reverse cloaking vs. scrapers: simple user agent detection, if the user agent is not a major SE spider insert; meta name="robots" content="noindex". Screen scrapers that steal an entries pages's HTML get a page that will not be indexed. Easily thwarted by someone who cares to but reduces duplication by scraping substantially. Links by proxy is an old trick. Hack someone else's site to create a link or redirect to one of your sites - either create a page or credit a URL using XSS attack... then link to it using a proxy URL. There are also public proxies that you can use. Proxy URLs as duplicates; thousands of public proxy servers, every URL on the web can be duplicated by them, proxy based duplicates when link to can affect duplicate content filtering. Public proxies pass along the user agent but proxies use their own IPs. How do you stop them? Spider validation vs. proxies; when you get a request from a search engine spider user agent, check the requesting IP address. This is dangerous so use with caution. But what if they get through? Change and rotate content; testimonials, news and headlines and use brute force. The most important page on your site is probably the home page, yet it is the least likely to get changed often (hmmm). Monitoring Dupes; set up monitoring for a signature SERP text that is unique to your pages, home page duplication is the #1 issue, use a second signature for internal pages and he then lists some tools. You can use the DMCA, digital millennium copyright act. Send the hosting provider or the search engines. I'll leave off the challenging the search engines slide.

Bill Atchison from CrawlWall.com is now up. He calls these bad bots, parasites. He said one day, a scraper took down his server. 10% of his traffic was from bad spiders, these parasites. Bad bots ignore robots.txt, spoof bot names, use multiple IPs. They want to get your data to make money. Motivations include, AdSense, YPN, affiliates. Who are these bots? Intelligence gathering bots, content scrapers, data aggregators, link checkers, privacy checkers, etc. Stealth bots vs. visible bots - visible bots are easy to block, the stealth bots are those masking as humans. How scraper bots use your content? He created the name CrawlWall to easily find pages that were unique to that keyword. He used that to locate sites that stole his content with the term CrawlWall. They took several web sites and scrambled the content together, to serve up Google AdSense. He sometimes feeds them back cookie information, so he can then track them better. He logs all this activity. Scrapers also cloak and hide your content. He shows two active proxies that hijack content, that crawled as Googlebot. How do you stop bots? Opt out bot blocking fails; robots.txt only works for the well behaved bots as the most bad bots ignore robots.txt except when trying to avoid spider traps. He went to an optin strategy. He said, only Google, Yahoo, etc. can come into my web site but that can get you intro trouble. You need to review your traffic prior to doing this. He finds Google Analytics very useful. He created a lot of rules to determine the difference between stealth bots versus a visitor. Some bots use cookies, very few bots execute JS, bots hardly every examine CSS files, rarely do bots download images, monitor speed and duration of site access, observe the quantity of page requests, and so on. He will then serve up a image access code to them. Robots.txt is spider trap because stealth crawlers reading this file expose themselves while trying to avoid spider traps. Also anyone visiting your privacy pages, it is probably not your visitor. Avoid search engine pitfalls; dont allow search engines to archive pages as search engine cache is also scraping target. People are also scraping through translation tools. Ways to rpotect your site: USe a script to dynamically display robots.txt and show proper info to allowed bots and all others see disallow. USer agent filtering and blocking with the rules structured for an OPIN allow list. Block entries IP ranges for web hosts that host or facilitate access for scraper sites. For blocking large lists of IPs, such as proxy lists, use PHP and a database like mySQL.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! is now up. Yahoo! Search Web Crawler is named Slurp. He has news about the new site explorer features. New features include; you can add your site, you then can authenticate your site (looks so much like Google Sitemaps), to authenticate, you place a file on your site and that will authenticate you. You can manage site feeds, rss feeds, etc. In addition to those standard features they added a subdomains filter, a different view of those results and a way to get those data out of the system via flat file or API.

Rajat Mukherjee from Yahoo! then moves on to bot obedience. Slurp is a very obedient bot he said. Read robotstxt.org. He showed us a photograph of slurp, a joke of course. Make sure you allow content you want Yahoo! to get and disallow content the content you dont want them to index. Yahoo! does honor a crawl delay parameter. http://help.yahoo.com/search is very well organized there, plus some new resources added there. Slurp is new and better, they announced it last week. They show the blog posts from Yahoo Search Blog and Loren Bakers blog from 7.28.2006 - where you should see up to 25% reduced load on your sites. He asks who have seen a reduction of load, and about 1.5 people raised their hands out of hundreds. Yahoo! does have multiple crawlers, but please send feedback to Yahoo about these crawlers.

Vanessa Fox from Google is last up. She put up some funny robots.txt files she found, she had no real slides. She talks about google.com/webmasters they announced last week, a tool to check your robots.txt file. She talks briefly about the www vs. the non www issue, which is now at the google.com/webmasters, that allows you to define which is the proper structure, www vs. non www. Every once and a while a host may block a googlebot IP.

Every now and then on an off day, I revisit the Big Blue Pineapple Chair page I have on this site. Why? Well, it gives me an idea of how well (1) this site is doing in the various search engines and (2) how well the search engines are doing with this site.

Same difference, but with number one above, I place the blame on my SEO work. With number two, I place the blame with the search engines themselves.

Since I have never made a change to that page, I suspect we can blame the search engines and not myself. Oh, I am sure the search engines have their excuses. But let's dig deeper.

Historically, I have been tracking this page, for those please see:

• The one and only Big Blue Pineapple Chair page
  
• December 1, 2004 review
  
• August 12, 2005 review
  
• August 16, 2005 review
  
• December 14, 2005 review

Ok, so from time to time, search engines rank that page differently.

Today, how are the engines treating that page?

Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 40! Ummm... Something seems wrong here!

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 1, that is correct.

MSN: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 1, that is also correct.

Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair
Result number 4, indented under an other seroundtable result. Top result is some spammy redirect.

At one point, Yahoo! didn't rank it well. At one point, MSN didn't either. At one point Ask ranked it better. And at one point, Google also ranked it well.

So what has changed? Can we look at this one example to see how Google changed as a whole for all sites? Seem typical of what we see in a forum?

At this time, it appears Google doesn't like this site. In a few weeks, months, years... maybe Google will. But this does not represent Google's results as a whole. Yea, well, I am still upset Google doesn't rank that page in the top 10. I see no reason why it is not the most targeted page for users. Heck, no one wants a big blue pineapple chair, they don't really even make them. So relevancy here, well, it is not existent from a searcher's perspective. From an SEO's perspective, I think my page is pretty well relevant.

Who knew I would have this obsession with Big Blue Pineapple Chairs?

The reason for this post is two fold. (1) To keep track of the rankings of that page and (2) to note how this is a typical thread at a forum. Many folks look at their isolated site and suggest the issue is global for all sites. I doubt this is the case. But giving Google specifics, like I am above, can sometimes help them improve relevancy on their side. If they deem it appropriate.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some interesting and almost unbelievable conversations of Webmasters stating that Yahoo! cares less today about the visible content on the page then it ever did before. Here are some quotes:

The suggestion put out there.

More recently i noticed that Yahoo will rank a page for a search string providing either a) the sites address contains the keyword or b) the page contains the keywords but only with VERY low density.

Someone else posts supporting data:

In April, I did a KW density comparison on the top 10 sites and found a pattern ranging from the #1 site (approx 3.9%) to lower KW densities. After May, there was NO pattern, so you may be correct

A humorous but supporting example:

One of my sites on a US server (not my own server, I hasten to add) was hacked a few days ago and the index page was replaced by a political extremist. Before I could put it right this site was spidered by Y! and now ranks on the first page for an important keyphrase, despite containing just a mindless rant, whereas before the hack it was nowhere.

I was about to shake this topic off and not cover it, but who am I to say. Figured it was worth a mention and a deeper look by some.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I reported last Friday at the SEW Blog that Yahoo! has announced the launch of a new crawler, slurp. The new slurp is faster and more efficient;

In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.

While transitioning to the new crawler over the past few weeks, we had been running both crawlers in tandem. In some cases, this increased the frequency of Yahoo Search requests to websites. Now, with the new crawler in full production, we have turned off the old crawler and site owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage.

With this change of behavior in the crawler, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo launched a new tool in the Korean domain named Webzari. What it does is use the Site Explorer data to map your inlinks on a map, in the form of planets. A link map, in a sense, with AJAX and more flavor.

You can check it out in action by clicking here.

Pretty cool and here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

It appears that Yahoo! continues to make tweaks to the new index and algorithm they set into place on July 13/14th. Webmasters are still tracking the changes in the WebmasterWorld thread.

WebmasterWorld Yahoo! Moderator, caveman, notes;

Ya, just a tweak ... not sure for the better, but just having a look now. Most of the issues with the latest update remain. Looks like the internal site issues are still there (wrong page/right site) and externally, force is certainly outweighing meaning/intent. Putting this much emphasis on external links w/o having theming/mapping, authority, and (ideallly) semantic stuff working well is problematic. Issues that arise include: - quality niche sites with good but not huge numbers of links tend to struggle (I see a little more of that with this tweak, I think) - searches with words having multiple meanings can be awfully bad - lots of links with right words can work wonders for a page/site, even if from only vaguely related and unrelated sites.

Add to that heavy handed filters that clip out best pages and feature bad choices from good sites, and you've got a real mixed bag. Link sellers gotta be feeling giddy right now.

Some SEOs are loving it, some are hating it. What did you expect?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! appears to be updating their algorithm and index. Maybe it is related to this Yahoo! Redirects Link Command Requests to Site Explorer. Anyway, two large discussions taking place on the Yahoo! update.

Oh, by the way, we reported a Google PageRank Update this morning.

Forum discussions at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Confirmation from Yahoo! on this update at the YSearchblog.