How Does Yahoo Determine it's "Webrank"

[GuyFromChicago]

Just curious if Yahoo uses the same factors when determining webrank as google does when determining page rank?

[digitalpoint]

Best I can tell it's a like a cross between PageRank and Alexa rating (both link popularity and visitors using the Yahoo toolbar). But I'm not 100% certain on that.

- Shawn

[tphyahoo]

We have virtually disappeared from yahoo since they switched from google to overture with pay per inclusion. Still in the index, but rankings don't rank anywhere.

Do we have to pay the $229 to be included in the yahoo index to rank decently for our keywords? Or is it possible to do this with better SE optimization, as can be done with google?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[compar]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

Best I can tell it's a like a cross between PageRank and Alexa rating (both link popularity and visitors using the Yahoo toolbar). But I'm not 100% certain on that.
- Shawn

Where did you find anything that suggested it took links into consideration? I read the FAQ and anything else I could find and I didn't see anything that suggested it was anything other than a pure popularity measure.

[digitalpoint]

Well immediately when they released it, I had a couple sites that I'm certain no one visited with the toolbar except myself (they are very low traffic sites, nothing to do with search engines), but they have very high link counts. Those sites were coming up with WebRanks much higher than digitalpoint.com (whcih gets about 1000x more traffic and much of it SEO related).

- Shawn

[Bizcut88]

Originally Posted by tphyahoo

We have virtually disappeared from yahoo since they switched from google to overture with pay per inclusion. Still in the index, but rankings don't rank anywhere.

Do we have to pay the $229 to be included in the yahoo index to rank decently for our keywords? Or is it possible to do this with better SE optimization, as can be done with google?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

I have one site I never submitted to yahoo or ink and a couple days ago it started showing up #3 and 4 for a specific keyword.

So the answer is no you don't have to pay and yes SE optimization does work in helping yahoo rankings.

[ViciousSummer]

Originally Posted by Bizcut88

I have one site I never submitted to yahoo or ink and a couple days ago it started showing up #3 and 4 for a specific keyword.

So the answer is no you don't have to pay and yes SE optimization does work in helping yahoo rankings.

Two of my keywords are consistantly showing up #1 & #14 in Yahoo, and I did not pay for inclusion. But, I also havn't done any SEO to this site, aside from a couple meta tags and a couple of links. Hmmm, maybe that's why I'm in the 180's in Google...

[compar]

Back to WebRank. Your palcement in the Yahoo's SERPs for any given keyword have nothing to do with their new WEbRank measure.

Again I haven't read that it works like Alexa -- you have to have the tool bar loaded.

And I would be very careful about drawing any conclusion from the relative placement of pages or site. This is only a beta version and I have found it very inconsistent from usage to usage. I've seen it rank the same site anywhere between 2 and 5. Put the same site in 3 or 4 taimes a day and see if it doesn't give you 3 or 4 different ranks.

[sarahk]

Traffic huh?
Well according to my logs my sites should be ranked
* pcpropertymanager - Google PR5
* botspotter - PR5
* property coaching - PR4

but according to Shawn's tool Yahoo have them as:
* property coaching - 7
* botspotter - 6
* pcpropertymanager - 2

So, either the people testing this tool bar are right into property investing in NZ or there's something fishy going on.

[compar]

But the Yahoo tool cannot be compared to Google's PR. They are measuring two totally different things. PR is the mathematical sharing of all the PR from the pages you link to. It has got absolutely nothing to do with how often your site is visited.

The Yahoo Web Rank is all about visits. It is a pure popularity measure based on the number of visits.

There is absolutely no reason it should parallel or duplicate the PR ranking.

[Foxy]

Absolutely

and as it is based on Alexa with a limited sample the factoring of the results will produce "strange" results

However I would not discount it as Yahoo obviously use it [obviously] but you will need to interpret it

[candysmith]

jeeez, how many toolbars do i have to have on my system... i thought google & Alexa was already too much, seems now I need Yahoo's one too?

... off to download Yahoo toolbar.....

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by candysmith

jeeez, how many toolbars do i have to have on my system... i thought google & Alexa was already too much, seems now I need Yahoo's one too?

... off to download Yahoo toolbar.....

You could just use Shawn's tool to check Yahoo rank rather than installing toolbar #3.

Me, no more toolbars until the digitalpoint toolbar hits the net

[Foxy]

Yep just use Shawn's tool

[tsptom]

My site was ranking 3 on both Google's and this new Yahoo ranking tool. I had an Overture and Google AdWords account but had some suspicious activity with Overture. I cancelled the account and now my Yahoo rank is 0 and my site will not come up at all on a basic Yahoo search.

Am I being paranoid or are they purposely "getting me back?"

thanks,
tsptalk

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by tsptalk

My site was ranking 3 on both Google's and this new Yahoo ranking tool. I had an Overture and Google AdWords account but had some suspicious activity with Overture. I cancelled the account and now my Yahoo rank is 0 and my site will not come up at all on a basic Yahoo search.

Am I being paranoid or are they purposely "getting me back?"

thanks,
tsptalk

What do you mean by "suspicious activity"?

Might not be a bad idea to post your url in the website review section too - you can get lots of good suggestions from the users in this forum.

[sarahk]

http://www.tsptalk.com/ ?

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by tsptalk

My site was ranking 3 on both Google's and this new Yahoo ranking tool. I had an Overture and Google AdWords account but had some suspicious activity with Overture. I cancelled the account and now my Yahoo rank is 0 and my site will not come up at all on a basic Yahoo search.

Am I being paranoid or are they purposely "getting me back?"

thanks,
tsptalk

What key phrase are you targeting?

As far as your rank goes, you only have 1 site linking into yours. It has a PR 4, and that’s where your PR3 in Google is coming from.

With only 1 link & an 8 page site (indexed in Google) it will tough to be competitive on any keyword phrase with any competition what-so-ever.

[nlopes]

Yahoo ranking is strange...
digitalpoint.com has only 2 and mine website has also 2.
but PR of digitalpoint is 6, while mine is just 4.

What are the differences?

[GuyFromChicago]

I really don’t think Yahoo’s web rank has any real relevance at this point. I can’t really see any rhyme or reason as to how/why sites rank the way they do with Yahoo.