Content is NOT king.

[nohaber]

Content is NOT king. At least on Yahoo.
Let me tell you what happened today. In the morning I was #60 for fitness software and #102 for diet software. I have had these rankings for months.
Now, I am #8 for fitness software and #11 for diet software.
What has changed? I haven't had any major listings.
Today I changed my design and threw out all articles. I have for a long time suspected that Yahoo's link popularity is divided mostly "on average" i.e. if you have a certain popularity based on all incoming links, it is distributed among your pages. So, if you have 10 pages vs 100 pages, in the first case, every page has 10 times more link pop.
NOW: Today I modified my robots.txt and disabled Yahoo's slurp on my forum. My forum generates a lot of useless number of pages. Yahoo reads robots.txt very often. Now, my rankings jumped.
I can see this pattern on all my competitors - LESS pages = higher rank (more link pop).

I may be wrong. The only other explanation is that Yahoo has had a major update (algorithmic, links, whatever).

Anyone see drastic change in Yahoo rankings without gaining links?

[Chris]

Do not jump to conclusions so quickly.

We know Google uses links before they are listed in a link search, Yahoo may be the same.

It could also be that the sites above you changed, or it could be an algorithm change as you said.

[nohaber]

Chris,

It could also be that the sites above you changed 100 sites changed :)

There was an interview with John Glick from Yahoo, who said that link popularity of a site is based on incoming links and that internal linking does NOT matter. So, these incoming links must be distributed among the pages in some way, right? I think more pages = less link pop every get at Yahoo.

Now I have disabled my articles and newsletters directories in the robots.txt (for Slurp) and I'll see if this changes it further. I have removed these pages from my site, so I'll just let Yahoo know about it ;)

[Kyle]

I can confirm a major update at Yahoo. Very significant changes on some of the key SERPs I watch.

[nohaber]

I can confirm a major update at Yahoo. Very significant changes on some of the key SERPs I watch.
That might be it! MSN/Inktomi results also follow Yahoo's.

For now, I get my words back about Yahoo's link pop. I may be right though to some extent. If I am wrong, it will mean that once you get your link pop, you can add hundreds of pages and they will all top rank.

More pages = less link pop each page gets (also PR). The question is to what extent many pages take out rank from the each other.

[Dan Morgan]

Yes - overnight Yahoo has stopped listing my ski site under its old domain (albeit new title) and has finally acknowledged the 301 and has listed the new url (also jumped to #2 from 3/4).

[chromate]

I got a couple of top spots on Yahoo for main keywords.

[Chris]

I must say, diversity is a good thing. I am ranked nicely on Yahoo too, which is nice considering Google's instability.

[adavis]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My site http://www.trustmymechanic.com which has been around for a few years and receives aprox. 15,000 visitors a day....until August 1, 2004. My home page is not showing up in Yahoo and their partners, a handful of my deep pages are but the site has 80,000 static HTML pages.

I never really gave much of my traffic credit to Yahoo and the others, I mainly concentrated on Google, but boy did I under estimate the power of Yahoo BIG time. I found this https://sitematch.overture.com/Over...EnterUrls.jsp&o= which is kind of new news to me. I new Overture PPC had these guidelines, but now they are also Yahoo guidelines. I must admit I am sorta guilty of a few of their guidelines, but it seems most sites on the Internet are....including Yahoo itself.

My sites might have become, in a way, OVER affiliate program friendly I guess if I look at it through Yahoo's eyes, but that is how I make my living. I am inthe process of de-optimizing my sites, with hopes the Yahoo bot will see I did make some needed changes to try and stick within their guidelines. The Yahoo bot is still crawling my site, so I suppose that in itself is a good thing. Does anyone know if Slurp will see teh changes I made and re-instate me or will I have to make human contact? I am assuming Yahoo is getting flooded with emails from dropped site webmasters at the moment.

Since so many sites should be affected by these guidelines, the ones that clean up quickly and get reindexed should benefit greatly from Yahoo traffic once again....as competition will have diminished.

I dont know if paying the $299 inclusion fee to Yahoo (which I have never done) is the answer to getting relisted after the changes have been made. They say they will not refund the inclusion fee no matter what! Seems I am at the mercy of Yahoo....Yuk!

Open for suggestions,
Austin Davis

[fatnewt]

I also had a couple of jumps in Yahoo! recently. Nice to see, as I haven't had a great time in that SE since it came into existence early this year.