Looks as though Yahoo is becoming a tool to help the big, corporate sites now. If you look at their results, they are either the big companies with no links or blogs that are worthless. So sad, Yahoo has become IRRELEVANT. These corps never could compete in the search optimixation world and now Yahoo has just given them rule of the roost. Hey, morons at Yahoo, here is a hint; that's what Pay Per Click is for. If these dinosaurs don't want to spend the time on SEO, then PAY FOR IT!
What terms are you searching for? Big companies with no links should come up for their company name, regardless of their SEO. By the way, Yahoo has not "become" irrelevant, they never were.
I have been noticing the same pattern, sadly. And not just with Yahoo either. But I have seen the same thing happen mostly with Yahoo, the big corporate sites seem to have some unfair advantage now. I noticed this trend starting recently. perhaps 6 months ago or so.
Call them authority sites or whatever. What this is saying is that backlinks aren't important anymore. "What" constitutes an "authority" site?
I'm not sure what you want. Say for example I search for "viagra"; do I want hundreds of SEO'd spam "L@@K BUY IT NOW" sites to be the first result, or do I want the actual manufacturer and some relevant information about that product? If you are a manufacturer, source, or "authority" on something are you obligated to do SEO just to beat some guy who wants to make money from your company/product/idea name?
There is a good point in this action by Yahoo. I agree with CymaxStores: I dont want to see hundreds of SEO spammers as my first result when i search for something i want in the search engine. Prioritizing Authority sites is a good move.
I dont understand .. can you guys show us an example of this 'injustice' ? But then anyway, the decision lies with them.
Specific Info Yahoo Paid Inclusion Here's an example: Search for "book" on Yahoo. The first result I get is Barnes And Nobles. If we strip away all the various crap that Yahoo! puts in the outbound links, we see this: Basically, it's part of the Search Marketing program at Yahoo. It's PPC within Organic Search. I can't say you'll show up number one if you have no ranking within yahoo, but the case above, where BN ranks above Amazon, is a good example of the ppc in organic search algorithm yahoo is running. Does this make sense?
yup, first result is paid - but no mention anywhere that it is. http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt...oA?p=book&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt wonder what other terms are rigged
Wow, that explains alot! So Yahoo is just another Lycos or Excite except they hide the fact that they are putting PPC in the "organic"results. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot. Looks like the market is ready for a new search engine-the next person or company that does this is rich.
Guys, if you do a little research, you'll see: 1) All you get from Yahoo is a guarantee that they'll crawl your stuff. For that you pay both an upfront cost AND a PPC. Frankly, for the sites I run, it's not worth it, but I can see why it might be economical for some sites that have a lot of content (esp. hidden content) that changes frequently, like, say a bookstore 2) Yahoo _can't_ give preference to sites that are in paid inclusion, because if they did they could get into deep s**t since they a) said they wouldn't give preference, and b) have to by law (SarbOx) track these things. Food for thought: although G doesn't directly have a paid inclusion program, they do indirectly - see e.g. http://www.seobook.com/archives/001989.shtml Have you ever thought that maybe BN (which is primarily a bookseller) is considered more relevant by most users for the term Book than Amazon (which over the years has become a general retail store)?
spratjac - I happen to have an idea about the specific results this thread was opened up about, and let's just say it's not nearly as clear cut as BN and amazon.