Yesterday, Yahoo announced that they are doing a search index and algorithm update. They said, like they do almost every month:
The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.
But like last month, no one really noticed anything when the announcement went live. Back in the old days, we normally saw forum discussion before the announcement - with SEOs and webmasters noticing changes before Yahoo was ready to admit it. But the past few times, no one was talking about changes even a day or so after Yahoo announced it.
Why aren't people talking about it like they use to?
(1) Webmasters don't care about Yahoo anymore? (2) Traffic from Yahoo may be insignificant to most webmasters for them to notice (3) Yahoo is more proactive about letting us know before any changes are made (4) Yahoo is not really doing a serious update
I don't see any discussions on this currently at WebmasterWorld (this may change soon, since I posted a thread). I do see one webmaster at DigitalPoint Forums complaining about his link count in Yahoo, but people suspect this is unrelated to the update and more related to his site being considered web spam.
So what is up Yahoo? Really? Why invest in search backend when Microsoft will soon take that over?
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
Update: The WebmasterWorld thread was posted shortly after this post and still no one really notices anything. One person said, "noticed a spike on one site starting April 29" but that came only after reading the Yahoo post.
