Yahoo Updates Their Index
Yahoo’s index has changed. They had notified webmasters in September that they had made upgrades to their algorithm to go along with the new Yahoo Search Assist. It took a couple of weeks for them to roll out the update, but there are significant ranking changes in their SERP’s.
What Has Changed In Yahoo?
One of the more significant changes I noticed was there are more blog type pages in their natural SERP’s. Yahoo has always been behind Google when it comes to recognizing blogs as solid content providers. This blog has never had many pages in Yahoo’s SERP’s, but today I noticed over 75 posts that cracked the top 20 for its keywords. This is good news for social network marketing based search engine optimization strategies.
One thing that I have noticed in comparing Yahoo to Google is that Yahoo’s SERP’s have improved and in many cases are better than Google. The reason why everyone used Google in the first place was the relevancy of their results. Over the last year Google’s results have been watered down with ad-only, weak content sites. Yahoo has tightened up the Inktomi engine and let in fresh content sites. They don’t give as much juice to Wikipedia either which is a good sign.
The bottom line is that except for ASK, the major search engines have all suffered from content spam and are not as relevant as they used to be just 3 years ago. From a marketing standpoint it is more important than ever to utilize social network marketing strategies and to follow Solid SEO Guidelines.
A final note: Yahoo’s spider which is called Slurp is still based upon Inktomi. Meta tags are very important to Yahoo, more so than Google. Your site’s description can greatly affect your placement. With WordPress there is a plugin called Head Meta Description which allows you to control the meta description, but on other websites it is important to optimize your description for Yahoo. If you don’t have a proper meta description Yahoo will resort to the one that is in the Yahoo Directory which is BAD. If that has happened to your site you can apply the following meta tag for both Yahoo and Google’s directory which is just as lame, the ODP:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir” />
Be sure to check your meta tags if you expect to have any placement in Yahoo.
Another problem with Yahoo is their ping service. I have noticed that many Site Explorer API’s are not functioning anymore. None of the WordPress systems I maintain are able to update Yahoo through ping or XML-RPC. If you are unsure of what XML-RPC or ping services are read my post: Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing for an explanation and a list of ping services.
I believe that these are just some bugs related to their Search Assist update and the recent shuffling of their index.
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