WebmasterWorld members report that Yahoo has announced its new crawler, Slurp 3.0. Now, when you analyze your weblogs, you'll be seeing Slurp 3.0, though it recognizes the same user-agent and robots.txt as before.
More importantly, they are invalidating all other Yahoo Slurp IP addresses and using brand new ones for this update. IP-based rules will need to be changed.
Search Engine Land provides more information, where Barry writes that the new IP addresses will still reverse DNS lookup to crawl.yahoo.net.
On WebmasterWorld, your work is getting more complicated, according to Wilderness. There are still 11 different spiders and 5 user agents to keep track of. But Barry explains this clearly: "If you set directives for "Slurp" or "Yahoo! Slurp," those will remain working, but if you specified "Slurp/2.0," then you may have an issue."
It is kind of funny, in that Yahoo's spiders are having the same old problems that Yahoo's business unit is having. Remember the Peanut Butter Memo, where Yahoo talks about their lack of clarity between all their business units and properties. It's all too familiar once again.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.
Note: "Me" in this case refers to Barry. I'm only here to report about Slurp 3.0. ;)
