Doing The Yahoo! Yo-Yo! - The April 2006 Update

My daughter’s expression probably reflects the reaction of webmasters worldwide
as they went through the Yahoo! Yo-Yo! in April

Every webmaster does it. They try NOT to be bothered by it, but if they’re serious about making a success of their website(s), they’ll eventually get their hands dirty with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

When search engines update their index, there will be a period where the search results fluctuate as they replicate the index between their many datacenters. This means that depending on your location and which server you query, your website may be ranked anywhere from page 1 to nowhere!

Yahoo! recently rolled out 2 updates in April. Based on their official Yahoo! Search Blog, they have been using an improved indexing system, but many webmasters experienced a host of problems with the Yahoo! serps in April, some of which were :

• :ohman: The RSS links (View As XML & Add to myYahoo!) links went missing.
• :ohman: Sites were dropped from the serps altogether or had a large portion of their websites going missing
• :ohman: Sites dropping down the rankings.
• :ohman: Long-time banned and removed sites suddenly floating to the top ten.
• :ohman: Sites bouncing in and out of the top ten in the serps.

Why is Yahoo! important to these webmasters you ask? Shouldn’t they be more bothered about Google?

Well, many search engines have an age-factor in their algorithms. This means that if you’re a new site, the chances of your site being listed in the serps - especially for Google - for your chosen keywords are very slim IF your chosen keywords are very competitive. Yahoo! is an easier site to be listed on albeit they provide a smaller traffic volume compared to if you were listed in Google. However, as most webmasters will tell you, as they work (and wait) to get their sites listed in Google’s serps, they’ll take any traffic they can get and if Yahoo! provides them with traffic, they they’d better up and take notice of Yahoo! serps changes!

For me, April taught me a very valuable lesson. I learnt that my traffic from Yahoo! was very targetted and as I bounced around in Yahoo!’s serps in April, my stats dropped and so did my earnings. And so, I spent long hours finding out all I could about Yahoo!’s serps and tracking the changes via forums and chat rooms.

The final result? Well, I’m happy that things have stabilized (for how long I do not know), but one thing I do know… I didn’t enjoy watching my sites to the Yahoo! Yo-Yo!:shock:

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