14 replies to this topic

[wholland]

Hi All,

After the April 1st update of yahoo, my site went from 1-3 for most terms to 2nd page or worse. I started looking for reasons why the drastic drop in the serps. My conclusion, a link to my site with an error is causing problems with Yahoo. Several links to my site are using www.www.site.com, to link to my site. unfortuneately my host responds to just about anything followed by .mysite.com.

Looking at other yahoos such as yahoo.co.jp or yahoo.ca, which appear to be using the old index, my site ranks the same as before. Doing a site:mysite.com returns www.mysite.com as first result. Now, the reason I think these inbound links have hurt my rankings. Doing the same search, site:mysite.com on yahoo.com returns www.www.mysite.com as the first result. www.mysite.com is not even in the results returned by the search. I'm thinking yahoo, is interpretting this as duplicate content, and penalizing my site. I've put some 301 redirects now, to try and fix the problem.

Does this sound logical, can you hurt other peoples rankings by linking t0 them with a link like this? Will the 301 fix it? Or maybe this doesn't have anything to do with it at all. I dont really see another explanation, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Will

[Michael Martinez]

It's not a penalty. It's just that your site has lost visibility for its proper name.

Where did the bad links come from?

Can you get the links fixed?

The 301 redirects may help. They may not.

Yahoo! is probably the most link-sensitive engine out there.

[wholland]

The 301s seemed to work, this last update doing the site:mysite.com returns www.mysite.com as the first reslult. And I have went from page 2 to #1 for most terms.

[qwerty]

Yahoo! is probably the most link-sensitive engine out there.

Sorry I'm coming into this a bit late, but could you clarify the above statement, Michael? Getting new links generally produces a greater benefit on Google than the other engines, so do you just mean that a bad link can do more harm in Yahoo than other SEs, and if so, would that mean just a badly-coded link, or would it include a link from a bad place, or a link from an irrelevant place?

[Jill]

Going from page 1 to page 2 is simply normal movement in any month.

[Michael Martinez]

Sorry I'm coming into this a bit late, but could you clarify the above statement, Michael? Getting new links generally produces a greater benefit on Google than the other engines,

That is actually not the case. Yahoo!'s Inktomi engine has always been more sensitive to links than Google, which has always paid more attention to on-page factors.

...so do you just mean that a bad link can do more harm in Yahoo than other SEs,

What I mean is that, if you lose your visibility (through proper inbound links) in Yahoo!, you'll notice the effect more quickly. Google is quite forgiving of lost links. Yahoo!'s Inktomi technology is not so forgiving.

That may explain why their index seems perpetually smaller than Google's. They may be still be dropping sites for lack of links (a practice for which Inktomi was notorious).

...and if so, would that mean just a badly-coded link, or would it include a link from a bad place, or a link from an irrelevant place?

The context here was a badly coded link. Reputation, authority, "bad neighborhoods" have nothing to do with this particular behavior of Yahoo!.

[qwerty]

Yahoo!'s Inktomi engine has always been more sensitive to links than Google, which has always paid more attention to on-page factors.

I really didn't think that was what you meant. What I've seen (and what I believe others have generally agreed to) since Yahoo dropped Google has been that sheer numbers of links make a much bigger difference in Google.

What I generally see is that if a given page is ranking well for a given query on both Yahoo and MSN, but not on Google, it's because the page has been sufficiently optimized for on-page factors, but doesn't have a lot of backlinks as compared with pages that are beating it in Google.

[leadegroot]

Its interesting - I find Yahoo the hardest engine to get into with a new site.
Google isn't terribly hard, I usually even manage to magically bypass the sandbox, but Yahoo doesn't love me and it is a long time before it even spiders me, despite links being sufficient for Google.

[Michael Martinez]

I really didn't think that was what you meant. What I've seen (and what I believe others have generally agreed to) since Yahoo dropped Google has been that sheer numbers of links make a much bigger difference in Google.

That hasn't been the case since about 2000. It's not the links but the anchor text that Google has been paying attention to.

While you would be correct to point out that links and anchor text go hand-in-hand, Google has not been the leader in determining rankings by link popularity for a very long time. That honor has pretty much been sewed up by Inktomi, and I see no indication that Yahoo!'s version of Inktomi is any different.

Yahoo! is a little more sophisticated (or maybe a lot more) than Inktomi was. At least they have a decent-sized database now, and people aren't scrambling to stay in the top 100,000,000 (and the only way you could do that was to build inbound links as fast as you could).

I actually stopped optimizing for Inktomi as Google took over the market. It just wasn't worth the effort. You can get by on most Google searches with on-page content and a reasonable number of inbound links. Increasing your inbound links gives you flexibility and stability with Google.

What I generally see is that if a given page is ranking well for a given query on both Yahoo and MSN, but not on Google, it's because the page has been sufficiently optimized for on-page factors, but doesn't have a lot of backlinks as compared with pages that are beating it in Google.

I only see that behavior with hyperoptimized search expressions, which represent an infinitismally small fraction of total search expressions.

Google's practice for several years has been to balance off-page with on-page content, but the SEO community has painted itself into a corner by repeating nonsense and half-facts so often people come to believe the standard link myths.

Unlike Inktomi, Google has always been pretty open about how it works. They just are not EXPLICIT about how they do things. Inktomi, they never really said anything. If you can reverse engineer Yahoo!'s search technology, you can reverse anyone's search technology. You get far more information about what the others are doing.

[Jill]

You can get by on most Google searches with on-page content and a reasonable number of inbound links. Increasing your inbound links gives you flexibility and stability with Google.

I actually find it to be the exact opposite. That is, that you can do the above with Yahoo and do great, but not with Google, where you'll need lots more time and links.

[Michael Martinez]

I actually find it to be the exact opposite.  That is, that you can do the above with Yahoo and do great, but not with Google, where you'll need lots more time and links.

Well, 80 per cent of all searches are non-commercial, and since the commercial sector isn't much like the non-commercial sector, the discrepancies in what people see are understandable.

Most content hits the top in Google searches on the basis of on-page factors chiefly because there is little to no optimization going on for most of those topics.

Where you have competitive optimization, people play the link card early and often. Once hyperoptimization kicks in, anyone else who wants to compete has to go for the links, too.

[qwerty]

Could you post an example or two? This is simply not what I see out there, and I do deal with plenty of keyword phrases that I would not expect you to label as "hyperoptimized".

[Michael Martinez]

Could you post an example or two? This is simply not what I see out there, and I do deal with plenty of keyword phrases that I would not expect you to label as "hyperoptimized".

What, exactly, do you feel two examples tell you? If 99 per cent of all searches were commercial in nature, or led to hyperoptimized results, I should still be able to find 2 examples that don't match those criteria.

NOTE: It will be some time before I can followup.

[qwerty]

I feel that an example would serve as an illustration of what you're describing, and nothing more, but I'd still like to see a couple of them. What you're saying here is very much opposed to what I've believed (based on both my own observations and those of others) for some time.

An example or two would at least give me an opportunity to examine the validity of the claim, even if it didn't completely convince me of what you're saying.

[Haystack]

Well, 80 per cent of all searches are non-commercial, and since the commercial sector isn't much like the non-commercial sector, the discrepancies in what people see are understandable.

Most content hits the top in Google searches on the basis of on-page factors chiefly because there is little to no optimization going on for most of those topics.

Don't non-commercial sites often have extremely high link popularity? As you've pointed out before, stanford.edu has a PR10.