The SEO Blog

Two months ago, ex-CEO Herry Yang left Yahoo! and two days ago, Yahoo! made Carol Bartz the new CEO.  Bartz has been described as being a straight shooter, very driven, a tech veteran and a few more personal opinions you can read for yourself.

Will Bartz be able to renew Yahoo!’s threat towards Google and entice another deal from Microsoft or does she have the potential to bring Yahoo! back to what it used to be?

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

I was working on some client stuff the other day and I went to check their links in Yahoo. I normally use my Firefox search because it is defaulted to Yahoo and then I use the Google toolbar for Google searches. Anyways, I did the link operator as show below. For those of you who don’t know what this does, it will search Yahoo’s index for how many pages they have of your site. You can also use other search operators to find things like links (what I was really looking for).

Once I hit search, I then want to see what links I have back to the site. I normally filter my results to take our any internal links and then filter again to see links coming into the whole site and not just the page I searched.

To filter the results, you click the drop down next to “Show Inlinks:” and select one of the options. When I do this, I get redirected to Yahoo’s main search page. I was confused so I tried it again and it still didn’t work. I checked the urls then throughout the process and noticed something weird. When I do the site operator or link operator from Yahoo’s main search, it automatically redirects me to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, like it should. The interesting part is that it then gives me a url that looks like this:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftkg.com&bwm=p&bwms=p&fr=sfp&fr2=seo-rd-se

This url is interesting because of the last part, the “fr2=seo-rd-se”. This looks like Yahoo is redirecting “SEO” traffic back to their main search when people are tyring these queries. It is almost like they are trying to filter out SEO search traffic or something. It is really annoying to not be able to do these queries from Yahoo’s main search. If you go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer directly, it allows you to filter the links without any problems.

Is it possible that Yahoo! has decided to fade out their backlink reporting? In a recent update, many site owners are experiencing HUGE decreases in the amount of backlinks that Yahoo! is reporting. There are a few theories that might explain the decrease; I suspect that Yahoo! is starting to discredit or devalue the backlinks that are seen by Yahoo! as “less important”.

TKG.com hasn’t experienced this drastic decrease in backlinks being reported (at least not yet). We’re still not where we were prior to the domain transfer, but we continue to climb…

The SEO world is buzzing about the recent news that Google, Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to make Flash file format content easier to find, index & rank. Google’s blog states that:

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog provides detailed Flash Indexing Q/A along with several comments that provide informative information as well.

As for Yahoo!, they will have the same capability once they update their technology…I’m hearing it should be soon.

I know I’ve focused a lot of posts on Google recently, but I haven’t forgotten about good ol’ Yahoo! I’ve been impressed with Yahoo’s reaction to our domain change during the last 42 days & I’m pleasantly surprised to see that the majority of our Yahoo! rankings are back and some have even climbed. Once Yahoo! was only indexing TKG.com - we were back on track.

Here’s a quick site migration update…..

• Google is still only indexing about 20 pages - no increase from Day 14 & still only a few more pages being seen than when Google first started indexing the site - 12 hours tkg.com was off the blacklist!
• Yahoo! link popularity is still climbing, now at 548
• Google appears to only be indexing www.tkg.com pages now; however, I am noticing instances where PDF’s on thekarchergroup.com domain are still ranking
• Yahoo! is still ranking both domains
• As mentioned on Day 19, MSN is now only ranking the new tkg.com domain
• Yahoo! is now indexing 631 tkg.com pages - 225 pages away from our original benchmark

19 days after the domain migration…

1. MSN is no longer ranking thekarchergroup.com; Yahoo! & Google still are

2. Search Engine rankings continue to fluctuate in MSN, Yahoo! & Google

3. Google is still only indexing 20-some pages of tkg.com

4. Traffic to the site is holding steady; Google continues to supply the majority of SE traffic

5. Yahoo! is now indexing 584 tkg.com pages; up from 487 on day 14 (5 days ago)

I’m still tracking! Here’s a mini-update, 14 days after the domain migration….

1. Search Engine rankings continue to fluctuate in MSN, Yahoo! & Google; SEs are still ranking both thekarchergroup.com & tkg.com

2. Google is still only indexing 20-some pages of tkg.com (up by only a handful in the last 4 days)

3. Traffic to the site is holding steady; Google continues to supply the majority of SE traffic

4. Yahoo! is now indexing 487 tkg.com pages; up from 125 on day 6 (8 days ago)

5. Google Webmaster Tools is now reporting that Google is indexing the site (5 days after the site was already being indexed by Google)

The numbers below represent our Search Engine rankings today vs the benchmark rankings we took before the site migration. A few things to note about these numbers:

1. MSN, Yahoo! & Google are still ranking both thekarchergroup.com & tkg.com; the numbers below represent only the tkg.com rankings

2. A handful of phrases are ranking solely because of my previous Search Engine Rankings Benchmark post - these will eventually go away and rankings will settle based on where actual content is within tkg.com and not just because the phrase was mentioned within a post

It’s been nearly 2 weeks since we migrated to TKG.com and I’m seeing that things are starting to “shake out”…

Link Popularity Trends…

Search Engine Saturation Trends…

Search Engine Ranking Trends…
The SEs are still ranking both tkg.com & thekarchergroup.com - I’ll get this data up tomorrow