Search Engine Journal Booted From Yahoo Search!?
Last weekend Priyank Garg, the Product Manager of Yahoo Search, made a post to the Yahoo Search Blog about a new update in which he revealed, and I quote; “As a result, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.”
When reading Mr. Garg’s statement on the YSearchBlog I immediately assumed that he was referring to the worthless spam sites indexed within Yahoo Search would be identified and excluded from the index. I never thought that my own site however, would be left out of Yahoo Search as a result of the update. This thread found on v7n today led me to do some ego searching in Yahoo, and I can say that I’m a bit puzzled by the results (and no John, I do not think Zawodny is the culprit).
A quick search for “http://www.searchenginejournal.com” on Yahoo Search returns this result:
We did not find results for “http://www.searchenginejournal.com”
Also try:
* Check your spelling.
* If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
* This might be an outdated URL. Previous versions may be archived at the Internet Archive.
Various other searches also lead to no inclusion of this site in Yahoo Search Results.
I also looked into other forms of searches in Yahoo’s index to see if there is some sort of flaw. Here’s what I found:
* Yahoo still reports sites that link to Search Engine Journal in its results.
* SEJ is still indexed in Yahoo News.
* We’re still listed in the Yahoo Blog Search results.
* One can even subscribe to our blog via adding us to My Yahoo or even sign up for Yahoo News Alerts for mentions of “Search Engine Journal” in Y!News.
* You can find screenshots and images from SEJ indexed in Yahoo Image Search.
* And finally, if you read the Y! Search Blog you’ll see that we’re listed and linked to in the Industry Sources section.
My conclusion is that for some odd reason, Search Engine Journal is indexed in almost every section of Yahoo and even linked to from the Yahoo! Search Blog, but currently not indexed in Yahoo! Search.
Can anyone think of an explanation for this? (Especially someone from Yahoo)
Yes you are still in Yahoo news.
I think I sunderstand in part what Yahoo is attempting.
Some blogs like yours and SEW are so well optimized that you guys show up as authority for many topics, subjects and products that have little to do with the search topic.
Sometimes Google will throw back to me results for a specific news article having little or nothing to do with search and I will see SEW in the top spot. Master optimising simply.
While I like SEW plenty I resent seeing low authority articles where they have no business.
It’s not yours or Danny Sullivan’s fault either, it’s the search engines that need to get it right.
Good luck, I like seeing your work in Yahoo News and I hope they leave you alone.
Mike, thanks for your opinion, but that’s still no excuse for being taken out of the master web index nor would I believe it to be the reason :)
Doing so would be like serving CityPages.com results only in Local search and taking them out of the main index.
Or deleting Target.com from the main index, and only showing their results in Yahoo Shopping.
Targeted niche search is the future, (well, here and now) but I do not believe that if a site fits the bill for the niche search results, that it should be removed from the normal results.
On the contrary, Yahoo, Google and MSN should use their personalization, history, behavior and relevancy technologies to determine when the intent of the searcher is to find news, local businesses, or a CD.
Thanks though, I do appreciate your feedback.
My guess is that you were removed because you allow comments with links. I think Google made an effort to discount this in their ranking algorithms – maybe Yahoo is discounting these types of sites altogether?
PV, would you say that this has to do with links in my comments or not using the NO FOLLOW tag in comment temp?
Well this is a guess, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously. To really be sure, you should look around to see if other blogs that are like yours are still indexed.
I’m not even that sure Yahoo honors no follows.
It could also be that Yahoo is still updating. This has happened to me before because Yahoo is usually slow.
To amplify your example above Loren, I don’t see you anywhere in Yahoo when I punch in “Search Engine Journal” … but I see your page as #1 for that term in both MSN and Google – yea, something is definately amiss (?)
Look at some of the places your site links to. If your site is about search engine marketing and you’re linking to sites about cars, people’s home pages, etc. – you’re basically a link farm that happens to provide excellent content.
I seriously am at a loss here. SEJ has too many inbound links for Yahoo to just up and lose it.
It has to be a penalty but why? No reason comes to mind.
Just to clear things up John, I do not feel that it is a penalty due to anything unethical or link oriented as SEJ’s incoming links are probably some of the most organic and transparent of any site I know.
Additionally, all of the links coming from this site, or 99.9% of them are highly relevant to the information on this site AND no PV, no link farming going on here.
Also not seeing much of a drop in traffic due to the current Yahoo organic listings situation and do agree that this may be an index updating flaw.
Given the wide syndication among all of the other channels in Yahoo, I do not think the quality or value of this site is being questioned. Nor are we experiencing indexing problems in any other engines.
So, just as being ‘booted’ is strong negative terminology, people assuming that there is a penalty going on is even stronger.
I’d rather think that the problem lies with Yahoo!, and not SEJ :)
Agree with you 100% about the problem being with Yahoo. Not an uncommon problem either – I’ve seen well known sites dropped from Yahoo in the past for short periods and then come back strong with for no reason whatsoever.
Loren,
We’re checking into it.
And you’re right–it’s not my fault! :-)
Just blame Tim. (kidding)
Jeremy
You’re awesome Jeremy. I take back all that stuff I said about you!
:P
Thanks for the update Jeremy.
I’m happy to give you and Tim something to do this Friday.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.searchenginejournal.com&y=Search+the+Web&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt
Looks like the site was picked up again yesterday.
Thanks for the help Jeremy.
Any explanation from Tim or the Y! Search crew on the problem?