Yahoo Issues

[worldofchat]

Hi there guys

Is anyone aware of any changes with yahoo search engine, my chat site seems to have dropped thru yahoo serps alarmingly and i have no idea why, i was in a very good position on there, but now im no where. i do submit a sitemap to yahoo.

Woc

[stymiee]

Just like all of the other search engines this happens. The odds are it will return to normal at some point. The best thing you can do is just wait it out.

[brandondrury]

This happens more frequently with Yahoo for me than other SEs. Don't worry about it. When it doubt, create a new tool and send out a press release.

Brandon

[MajorTom]

I'm getting a little fed up with Yahoo. They're spidering my sites like crazy, eating up my bandwidth but I don't get a single hit from their search??? I'm running Google Analytics and two stats packages on my server to analyze where my traffic is coming from but there's nothing from Yahoo.

I have numerous first page keywords in Google and I get a ton of traffic from both Google and MSN/Live, but absolutely nothing from Yahoo. Besides those two search engines, I get the most traffic from DigitalPoint and SitePoint forums.

As far as the Yahoo Directory, don't *ever* waste your money on it. I wasted $299 two years ago and my site still doesn't even turn up for my keywords.

[cheesedude]

Expecting to be ranked #1 isn't always realistic. For my two most competitive search phrases, I rank #5 and #1 in Google, and I'm on page 2 for both of those terms in Yahoo. But, at least Yahoo never put me in the Sandbox.

I know what you are saying about Yahoo sucking up your bandwidth. I have a blog (currently in the Google Sandbox) and of all the search engines, Yahoo spiders it the most, but Yahoo has never sent me a single visitor in nearly 5 months. (Google doesn't send me much anymore, either.)

With Yahoo, there is a way to limit the amount of pages by setting an interval in robots.txt. You could set one high enough say, like one page every hour, that should effectively decrease the number of pages crawled by Yahoo.

http://help.yahoo.com/help/aa/ysearc.../slurp-03.html

How can I reduce the number of requests you make on my web site?

There is a Yahoo! Slurp-specific extension to robots.txt which allows you to set a lower limit on our crawler request rate.

You can add a "Crawl-delay: xx" instruction, where "xx" is the minimum delay in seconds between successive crawler accesses. If the crawler rate is a problem for your server, you can set the delay up to 60 or 300 or whatever value is comfortable for your server.

Setting a crawl-delay of 20 seconds for Yahoo! Slurp would look something like:

User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 20

[worldofchat]

I'm getting a little fed up with Yahoo. They're spidering my sites like crazy, eating up my bandwidth but I don't get a single hit from their search??? I'm running Google Analytics and two stats packages on my server to analyze where my traffic is coming from but there's nothing from Yahoo.

I have numerous first page keywords in Google and I get a ton of traffic from both Google and MSN/Live, but absolutely nothing from Yahoo. Besides those two search engines, I get the most traffic from DigitalPoint and SitePoint forums.

As far as the Yahoo Directory, don't *ever* waste your money on it. I wasted $299 two years ago and my site still doesn't even turn up for my keywords.

lol ditto major tom, i am also in the yahoo directory and it seems to have affected the way people find my site on yahoo, i have recently put a robot statement in my site, to disable the yahoo directory listing description from appearing when somone searches for my site on yahoo search, i will wait and see if this helps at all.

I was really high on yahoo, so i have no idea whats gone wrong at all, i also do quite well on google !

Woc

[brandondrury]

As far as the Yahoo Directory, don't *ever* waste your money on it. I wasted $299 two years ago and my site still doesn't even turn up for my keywords.

A $600 investment is tiny for any keyword that is actually competitive. I'd like to know what other factors may have attributed to your lack of success.

There is no reason that the Yahoo directory should improve your search engine rankings. While it is a paid review, the vote cast by such a directory should not be worth as much as a real vote from a person who wasn't paid to vote for you.

I'm convinced that the Yahoo directory does provide trust, which when mixed with other link building / marketing should provide quite a bit of value.

Brandon