How Does Yahoo Determine it's "Webrank"

Right. But does not the stability of the SERPs imply that the actual webranks are more stable than they seem? That is, that the instability is in their reporting, rather than in the things themselves? If webrank were truly bouncing all over, would we not expect to see at least some material SERP movement to correspond?

Whether Yahoo's ratings are "stable" or "stagnant" is an interesting question. I suppose that time will tell.

 

I don't think Yahoo's webrank has anything to do with it's serps.

 

That's a gigantic leap in logic. It is akin to your argument about the importance of Google's PR. What makes you think for one moment that there is a direct one-to-one relationship between Yahoo's WebRank and their SERP placement?

To start with WebRank is a brand new tools that is only in beta. It is inconsistent as hell. The results are all over the place. You can test the same site 5 times in a row and get five different answers. And again there is no search term associated with it. So what does it have directly to do with a search for a specific topic.

In addition to that it appears to measure the "webrank" of domains not pages. The SERPs return pages.

Just because the SEs give us toys to play with is absolutely no guarantee that they are using the output of these toys are a major determinant of SERP placement.

 

What makes you think I said there was a "one-to-one" relationship?

What I have said before, and of which I have yet to see anyone set forth a reasoned denial, is that PR--or "WR"--must have some non-trivial significance and weighting value toward the computation of SERP. To say that "the SEs give us toys to play with" is to imply that the sole or dominant reason for PR's and WR's existance is that webmasters may drool over them; I, at least, do not believe that major for-profit corporations amuse themselves by creating essentially useless toys. If they are calculating them, they are doing so for a purpose.

Well, we know they're "all over the place". The real questions is whether or not the they we seem to see are in fact the they that Yahoo is using internally. That their method of reporting the WRs may give goofy replies does not assure us that the WRs themselves are correspondingly goofy.

That second assertion is assuredly so; I am unclear what the basis for the first is. Not, mind, that there is a problem with assigning a WR to a domain rather than a particular page: I have to think that through, but my gut reaction is that it is actually smarter than using a by-page basis. (It is smarter on the assumption that WR is used, as I hypothesize PR is, to weight the significance of backlinks; it seems to me--at first glance, anyway--that it makes sense to assign "significance" to a backlink on the overall strength of the site, which is to say the judgement of webmaster thereof, than on the particular site page on which she happened to place the link.)

 

nice comments and great sub.