yahoo= fubar the last few days
mike
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Joined: 08 Oct 2004
Posts: 71
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alot of strange reports. banned sites, black hat/spam sites showing up in serps, pages ranking high for odd keywords, previously top ranked sites disappearing, coming back then disappearing again.

lots of speculation about, some say it's algo tweaks, some hypothesis and corruption caused them to roll back the db, other theorizing that they're trying to bogusly inflate there #'s like google did. crazy stuff, so if anyone notices big changes, don't pull your hair out quite yet. General consensus is that all will be back to normal in the coming weeks
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erikZ
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Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 148
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Yes, I've been noticing odd behavior too. Sad thing about Yahoo is that you never know if it's just a bug, an error, or a deliberate action, at least you know Google and I assume the new MSN once it goes gold are decently programmed.

My guess is the same as yours though, sit tight, assume an error, watch the SERPs and discussions. Fix what's broken but don't make major changes or you'll never know what it was you did that moved you up or down.

It doesn't seem that Yahoo really cares that much, they've never fixed their 301 problem from what I can see, to me that's an indication that their algorythm is more messed up than they might be letting on. In programming relatively small surface glitches can often be the sign of underlyiing structural or design problems in the codebase. Obviously if the 301 thing was an easy fix they would have done it long ago.

I read one of their representatives saying that it was going to get fixed, they were working on it, that was over 1/2 a year ago, and it's still not fixed. Just doesn't seem like Yahoo is very serious about really competing with Google or MSN, but they'd better get serious if they want to play the game. There's lots of dead bodies in the search engine history books, doesn't take long either.

Personally there have been times that I found Yahoo to give better results than google, especially when google applies some new tweak that really messes with the results, yahoo would usually be pretty steady. I wonder if someone messed up? It's happened before, a single network admin at MS Hotmail server farm did one wrong configuration setting that broke Hotmail for 2 days, that one was very funny, shows you there's still plenty of room for human error.
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erikZ
Status: Contributor
Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 148
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That database error appears to have been fixed, I found many other interesting problems with Yahoo while researching this issue, including 1 year old orphaned pages. This might point to a weakness in the Yahoo algo, and might also be related to why they take so long updating 301 sites to the new domain name, if they are keeping pages in their index for 1 year, it's bound to get cluttered up.
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