Yahoo! Search Update Puts SEO In A Scramble

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 4 of August , 2008 at 7:31 pm

If you visit any of the SEO forums, particularly WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint you will have noticed one theme running through most of them over the last week and that is the turmoil created by Yahoo!’s latest search results update. Many sites that have ranked well for long periods (5 years for one site) now find themselves down to pages four or five.

It has certainly put a lot of site owners and search engine optimization experts in a spin wondering what on earth Yahoo! is up to. I think there are a couple of issues to think of.

There is some discussion that sites with keywords in the URL seem to be rating higher than prior to the update. The general consensus is that Yahoo! results are not as relevant to the search phrase now.

I have left off discussing this change to see if things would settle down, or perhaps see some communication from Yahoo! on the issue. So far, nothing has changed; the results are a little for many search terms although for some search terms, the results appear to be spot on.

Yahoo! has done a “Google” and kept very quiet about the whole change. I would not be surprised to learn that this is an experimental trial of a different algorithm. We may see over the next few weeks minor little tweaks before a final announcement from Yahoo!.

Achieving long term search engine rankings in the major search engines can be a volatile business at times with search engines changing the ballgame at will and without notice. This time the end results are less than desirable. One would have thought that, given the turmoil at Yahoo! in recent months, they would have tried to steady things. These changes have added more ammunition to Yahoo!’s detractor.

                      Category: Search Engines