From what I have read and found, it appears that about this time on a yearly basis that people suddenly lose yahoo rankings. What's up with this? We just had hundreds of our sites drop from page 1 to non existent. Some of the sites we had that were ranking poorly just jumped up but not a significant amount. Does anybody know what the heck is going on? I'm reading all over the net that other people are having the same problem so I'm curious as to what other people are finding. Comments would be GREAT! I'm going bald from pulling my hair out!!
I was reading some of your posts in another forum about it actually. Can't remember the forum but it was in regards to some of the same stuff. It could have been way old. Anyway, I've searched in Google for keywords about yahoo rankings drop and I found all this stuff dating back to 2002 about the same thing around the same time of year. It was always in Jan. & Feb where people were commenting on how their rankings got slammed to the floor and spit on by Yahoo. I really wish I knew what was going on. We have over 600 websites that we take care of and to watch them fluctuate not by a few rankings here and there but to suddently take rapid changes is driving us up a wall. All I read is that it will take a few weeks but there is never an explanation as to what the deal is. It's driving us all up a wall.
We've already looked at the typical reasons why it could have done it and we have even been able to conclude that age was not the reason. At this point, there is no logical reason other then that Yahoo is taking on the same algo that MSN recently fouled up on where it was all about the SEO rules of 1994. Luckily MSN is fixing that. No news on Y! though. You would think they would inform people of this. I've heard that you need to get involved with RSS and Overture now but my clients aren't going to step to that hell plus it's not good practice to tell people that "You need to purchase this and this and this in order to rank well". Besides that, their Terms state that isn't the case but then again... it's Yahoo! It has nothing to do with the age of our sites, the content, etc. The good sites took a fall and the bad sites stepped way up. Sites that have little content, poor design, extensively long domain names, etc... they are all suddenly ranked higher.
I really wonder if this has something to do with the "major" changes that yahoo is doing right now. Some of my clients can see a newly designed home page but most of them including my team and I are pulling up the old yahoo search page.
I'm monitering 4 sites but haven't seen any dramatic changes in yahoo lately. I'll let you know if anything comes up.
Significant changes in Yahoo ranking has happened with me on Feb 26 according to Keyword and Back Link Tracker.
Yea my site also completely dropped out of Yahoo in January. The site was only 6 months old, does well in most other search engines, is updated regularly and used to actually perform best in Yahoo! I did re-submit my site into Yahoo thou around christmas to update the listing. thats all that I can think it might of been as i submitted an existing site, anyone else do the same and receive the same problem?
Some of our websites have dropped in Yahoo for some keywords. Been for #1 for many many months and now dropped 5-9 places. Really strange, ranks in google and msn are the same.
Perhaps it is like a spring clean, or they do something similar to the way google will update PR on a sort of regular 3 month basis. Maybe this is how yahoo manage spam sites and bannings etc. Either that or at the same time each year people just start talking more about it. Brad
I noticed for my main keyword I dropped from #1 to #170 this morning...I had been at #1 w. yahoo for about 18 months. Hopefully this is just an aberation.
I had something similar happen with Google last week after only starting to appear for a week! Was getting good traffic from google then disappeared.
This sounds like the most logical answer. I've heard this happen to many people, mainly younger sites. Perhaps it's just there way of 'sieving' the content.
This happend to my site also. It was ranked #1, 2, 9 and 12 for various key words/phrases. Around the beginning of Feb. they disappeared completely. The site sell lingerie and 2 weeks before Valentine' Day... Argh! It's come back a bit, but nowhere near where it was. I have been attempting the analyze the problem and am just stumped. For example, if you use the search term "women's lingerie" the first site is a bit spammy (check out all of the variations stuffed into their keyword meta). Number 9 is an old newspaper article from 2004 and number 10 is a specific product on Target's site (pajamas, not lingerie and no mention of lingerie anywhere on the page). If you do a similar search for the term "lingerie" check out #18 - a Geocities site in Spanish. Y! seems to be favoring sites hosted on Yahoo stores. So has Y! just completely given up to G!? With SERPs like this, will anyone even bother using them in the future? Sorry for the bit of a rant, but I'm stumped. -Ramprof
I've noticed that the sites I've been working on follow a very simple rule when it comes to Yahoo! rankings. Basically, sites we have that are a few years old seem to be fine but sites a year or younger seem to be very slow to get rankings. Anyone else see this? PS, I wish to god they would display title tags and not my client's directory title, it drives me nuts.
i have an old site ( 1997 ) and also totally dropped oout of yahoo serps recently it must have been around may 2006 - noticed it just days ago - the Y traffic is so low that Y existence is nearly obsolete to my site however all the past years i had nearly same serps in Y than in G for most of my major keywords top 3-5 serps now suddenly out of some 400+ keywords only 1 ranks around #90 at Y all other keywords totally dropped out needs to be said that since years i have change nothing in my SEO and always resulted in excellent ( top 10 ) G/Y/MSN serps for all my site relevant keywords the spring clean up seems a most possible explanation to me as G also seems to do so annually - at least on my site - since about 2 years or so ... except that G serps are back to normal a few weeks after the total drop while Y with reduced $/HW power may just need a few months longer ( MSN may be a few years longer as their serps approach slowly but surely the G serps ) for the moment i do nothing at all about it except resubmit a few pages to Y and above all clean up, validate, improve, submit to a few more quality directories and create new content as usual i assume in a few months all be back to normal