Major Yahoo Update

**HHI Golf Guy** · 07-21-2005, 08:36 PM

Yahoo has made another major change to their index, and it appears that a new algo (or at least a variation of a much older algo) is in place.

Many sites that previously had only their home page in the Yahoo index now appear to have multiple pages in the updated Yahoo database. I have not compared any of our "baseline" sites against any new sites that have shown up in the top 10 for various SERP's, but some SEO's are concluding that Yahoo has gone back to placing a heavier weight with on-page optimization.

Our client sites all remained stable with their top 5 SERP's for major KW's. My company site did show considerable improvement for some of our major KW's:

1. real estate internet marketing - increased 15 spots to #1 out of 62,500,000.

2. real estate web marketing - increased 21 spots to #3 out of 43,700,000

3. real estate web design - dropped 9 spots from #5 to #14 out of 45,700,000

4. real estate web site - previously not listed in top 100, now #10 out of 160,000,000

5. real estate marketing - previously not in the top 100, now #8 out of 42,500,000

My should be a decent baseline for me to draw a few comparisons of the old algo and new algo because for the past 3 months I have not added any links, added new pages, or made any changes to any existing pages. If I get some free time in the next few weeks I will run some KW/single page density and KW/total site density analysis and post the results here.

Of course, there are many other variables that may account for the change in SERP's, but this is a good place to start.

Just saw this on the Yahoo blog:

July 20, 2005
Third Weather Report: Yahoo! Launched New Search Index Last Night
We made changes to the index last night so you should be seeing more of your pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches. The changes will be a little more intense than the second weather report and changes will continue over the next week or two.

**Phoenix Realtor** · 07-22-2005, 12:25 PM

Moved up to #3 for Phoenix Real Estate!!!

I know with my real estate Blog, Yahoo only shows the home page as being indexed, yet Google has indexed 96 pages of my brand new blog but has sandboxed it as it doesn't show in the SERP's. Yahoo has it placed appx. 3-4 page, MSN has it #1 on page one.

Yahoo has indexed many of the interior pages on my PhoenixHomes.com site though, they show 246 pages on that site. While Google shows 536 pages indexed.

So, looks like Yahoo is catching up a little bit.

**MaxSinclair** · 07-22-2005, 09:49 PM

Still having trouble with Yahoo. My domain name was cancelled by my registrar by mistake last week and my site was gone for about a week. Man! Looks like things have to start again.

Matt, I was checking out and admiring your site again. I noticed that your MLS search link is causing an error:

Search ARMLS Listings

Sorry, authorization failed. This service is not available on this website. For more information, contact the administrator of this website.

You might want to look into it.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 07-23-2005, 06:30 AM

Originally Posted by MaxSinclair

Still having trouble with Yahoo. My domain name was cancelled by my registrar by mistake last week and my site was gone for about a week. Man! Looks like things have to start again.

That really stinks! Did you get a free year of web hosting from them for your troubles?

I saw that MSN has indexed 100 of your pages, Yahoo has 44 pages, and Google has 24. If your rankings did drop because your site was down, they should bounce back in a few weeks.

Do you know many of your pages Google had previously indexed? I did notice that Google does not list titles and descriptions for some of your pages. These may be pages that they started to de-list because of the site outage. If these pages do not show titles and descriptions within a 2-3 weeks, I would see if there is another possible reason that G is pulling them from its index.

**MaxSinclair** · 07-23-2005, 09:24 AM

Yeah, I know it stinks! 1and1.com was the one cancelled the domain name. They've got to have the worst service and most incompetent tech support ever. And the worst part? I can't even get rid of them. They're the only people who could get my site back fast.

Once again, thanks for looking into things. Appreciate that!

**marcinsarasota** · 07-23-2005, 05:42 PM

I am still trying to get my sites un-banned in Yahoo. It has been 6 months now.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 07-23-2005, 07:18 PM

Originally Posted by marcinsarasota

I am still trying to get my sites un-banned in Yahoo. It has been 6 months now.

Marc,

I took a quick look at the number of pages that Yahoo has indexed for your sites. I assume the main problem that you are speaking of is thesarasotamls.com since Y has only one page indexed.

FWIW, since there is at least one page in the index you may be penalized, but you are not banned. I did have a similar situation with one of our sites. Here are a few suggestions that may help:

1. I did not see a robots.txt file on your site. Make sure that you have a valid robots.txt, even if you allow spiders to index all of your pages and if you use META robots=xxx on some or all of your pages. I have exchanged many, many emails with Y!, and among the items that they disclosed is that they consider this an important file for their spider to find. Why do they consider it so important? I don't know. But I felt that they were giving me a strong hint.

2. You have empty DIV tags i.e. <div id="header" align="center"> </div>. I can see that you are using that DIV to locate an image, but it has been rumored that with all of the tricks that can be done with an external css file that some SE's may interpret empty DIV tags as someone trying to use CSS to hide text. You should at least put "  " in the empty DIV.

3. Your 404 Error pages are not set correctly. Usually this is no big deal for spiders unless you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of 404 errors on your site, but I always like to dot my i's and cross my t's.You need to review the path the follows "ErrorDocument 404" in your .htaccess file.

4. Here's the big one: DUPLICATE CONTENT - YOUR SITE HAS BEEN PLAGIARIZED. The web site sarasota*houses*.net (remove the *) has copied the text on your home page. I would contact your attorney and have him/her send a nice letter to both the agents and their web design firm. You should also file a Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaint.

Guess what? I checked out the pages of the design firm that created the offendind site and they have plagiarized content from another design firm for their own web site!

**gemini** · 07-23-2005, 07:29 PM

That was very good update for our directory too - I have 11 #1 competitive phrases now

and 55 on the first page of results. All the phrases are state + real estate and state + real estate agents. Yahoo traffic increased almost 3 times. Very good.

**gemini** · 07-23-2005, 07:33 PM

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

Guess what? I checked out the pages of the design firm that created the offendind site and they have plagiarized content from another design firm for their own web site!

how do you figure who plagirized first? no offence I'm just curiouse.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 07-23-2005, 07:40 PM

Originally Posted by gemini

how do you figure who plagirized first? no offence I'm just curiouse.

There are a number of ways to find out. Some are as simple as viewing cached pages, checking the wayback machine, etc. Once I saw who created Marc's site, I was fairly confident that they would not plagiarize. When I saw that the creator of the offending site had plagiarized more sites it was easy to draw that conclusion.