Switching to Yahoo anyone?

[Paz]

For the last couple of months, I've increasingly had to turn to Yahoo for fresh, hot stories or data.

For instance, there was a problem with Yahoo site explorer, which we wrote about here a couple of days ago in this forum:
http://forums.digital-m.co.za/showthread.php?t=464

A search in Yahoo (http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Firefox+and+sec.yimg.com+cannot+communica te&ei=UTF-8&sourceid=mozilla-search&xargs=0&pstart=1&dups=1) for the error message; "Firefox and sec.yimg.com cannot communicate" gave 18 decent forum responses; though not Digital Marketing SA LOL

A google search (http://www.google.com/search?q=Firefox+and+sec.yimg.com+cannot+communica te&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official) gave one hit; which pointed to this Yahoo Answers RSS feed. (http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=browser)

It's like the big G. have given up and are recommending you to pop over to Yahoo.

Google will very likely to continue to be my default search engine; but for fresh stuff, I'll be using Yahoo! from now on.

[Chatmaster]

Yep, i agree. It happens alot that I use Yahoo! I cannot say the same for MSN though. But Google still is my favourite.

[lineops001]

hmmm, I have a rather large corporate client who is having to go down the route of Yahoo paid search (SSP) because even though the seo work we did has been fabulously picked up by G and MSN, Y! seems to be pulling ALL the data from some antiquated (at least 14 month) old directory (seriously - te site has changed, there was a coporate buy out, and all data on both sites has changed - like ages ago) instead of from the site itself - this *new* data was deployed 4 months ago....

The client has huge pull, and threatened Yahoo with no further search business unless they at least sorted the home page listing, which they *did*, but which is still a hash of what it should be... so while on my personal site I am making great leaps (thanks to Paz's astute insights once again :-)).. I can with all *authority* (under my limited little belt - and that's nothing to do with my weight unfortunately) say that Yahoo results can suck SERIOUSLY, and be very old - and the SSP better work for me with big time results or I'm for the crapper....well, not quite...but will have to get back in touch (again)with their dedicated yahoo rep and get the algo guys to look at it again... or my client will be seriously p*d with Y! and that - unfortunately reflects on me...

I have told them it is a Y! problem, Y! has agreed it is their problem, but they still say we must trial SSP (free trial so happy happy) but if we stop the trial, they refuse to say if the 'correct' listings will then be displayed...

Its all a bit demoralizing, and if I wasn't personally doing so well now (well getting there since I sorted my crappy links) with Y!, I'd be very circumspect... and yes, still working on Google Paz - and infinite thanks for pointing out what really should have been, well obvious... myopic on my part? nope. just a bit thick sometimes... dagnabbit

[Paz]

Sounds odd... Yahoo is definitely the best fresh crawler at the moment. I'm seeing it on 15 sites lineops!

Have you checked your server logs to see if Yahoo is crawling your site OK? I'd also check your robots.txt to make sure there's nothing strange there, as well as you meta tags in case you have any odd robots.txt instructions in there.


The other thing about Yahoo is it loves high PR links, relevant or not. You can get a PR7 link for about 30-40 bucks a month. It won't do anything for you either way in Google rankings, but it'll get you deep crawled in both very quickly. In yahoo you'll see a major rankings boost for your anchor text.

[lineops001]

Apparently my client isn't the only one having problems..check out the first comment...

http://searchengineland.com/070124-091055.php

[Paz]

Yeah VERY interesting background material L!

But reading through it suggests to me that the problem arose because Yahoo had an issue, tiggered because your titles possibly aren't descriptive enough. Do you thank that could be the case?

[newbie2010]

In yahoo answer, there are not so much peoples to answer.