I know this has been posted before but I believe this recent update is something special. I've been following yahoo serps for a few years now and have never seen anything like this. See below: Now I'm not going out on a limb and saying this is the case on every niche, but I wonder if others are seeing this shift. I noticed this due to one of my clean, #4 ranked sites (for the past 4 years) dropping for all terms today and being replaced with, at #4 shopping.yahoo.com/p:Family Guy Xbox:1951273559 Of the top 10 results, 5 were not there yesterday and are very clearly paid inclusions. What is going on here?
shopping.yahoo.com is indexable. Google has its pages listed as well. It's just that yahoo sucks so bad, those pages actually rank for something.
And none of these results have a cache. On page 2 there are results that have sessionids. These aren't indexed they're placed. Try this link: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu7N.yJZGWlUBDYtXNyoA?p=south+park&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501 Same deal. Half of the results are paid, with no cache.
Did you look at my screenshot? The purple links, which I believe to be paid have no cache. Does anyone else see the same? I see the old results in IE but these results in firefox. Perhaps my browser has been hijacked?
I see the non=cached in your results, but I don't see #4 either (it starts at 5). Every site there is listed in search engines, I don't see anything abnormal there? the sites could have caching turned off.
Do you work for yahoo!? I used to run ypn ads on my site and recognize all of these links. This is 100% a case of paid listings in the results, without any indication that is what they are (apart from there being no cache on any). I am postive on this one, but not sure why it is showing in firefox but not ie.
I do not work for them. I'm genuinely curious here. I just don't see what you are seeing. I'm just saying that shopping.yahoo/bizrate/shopping/etc also appear in google. why they rank high? who knows. my theory - yahoo sucks (and i think its a sound theory). This is my yahoo "family guy" search.
Lorien are you getting that result with IE or Firefox? And don't get me wrong I'm not saying they shouldn't be in the results, it just looks very fishy that these sites, which we both know advertise on ypn just happen to not have a cache. And the results are duplicated with another search such as south park. Also intriguing to note that the results on the page that I believe are ads are not ads on the right. Any other related search and these would be ads in the skyscraper.
I'm on IE. If yahoo is fiddling, I bet its a server thing, not a browser thing much like google switching data centers.
Thanks, it's not about my site though. I could have #1 listings and still not receive any traffic. It's not about that One more screenshot specifically for you Lorien: Looking at it with IE the results are all cached, as they should be. But in firefox something does not look right.
I check in IE, Firefox and Safari and I don't see anything suspicious I'm sorry you dropped out of the top results. The sites do seem fishy but I think that is just a testament to Yahoo's crummy algo not that these are paid links.... Where would you go to purchase these links???
That is actually yahoo haha. I see those results in yahoo (as they've been for years..) in IE but see the ad results with Firefox. Maybe screen shot what you're seeing tusen? For a family guy search. Thanks
I would go to overture. There's crummy, which yahoo normally is then there's this. Side by side comparison: Where is teh cache?
I'm not sure why you would see them in Firefox and not IE......could it be because you are signed in you are seeing different results?..... It couldn't be Firefox because Google is the SE with the close relationship to Mozilla
I don't have a yahoo account, so no. I've done an adware scan and came up with nothing using spybot. I've tried it on two pcs with similar results. This is the same thing I heard when I posted about msn using dmoz titles/descriptions for results. Noone believed me but I proved that. So anything imo is possible.