Yahoo, Redirects & Disappearing Sites to Google Hijacking Problems
Yahoo, Redirect Problem Fixed?"TheotherTim Official Y! Rep: Redirect Handling
Well I can say we recently revamped the way we handle redirects in Yahoo search. We have documented the behaviors of 301s, 302s and meta refresh redirects in the presentation that I gave at Pubcon in Vegas. I will go through this again at the meet the crawlers session in Chicago next month. The presentation is available for download on the Yahoo Search Blog ( http://www.ysearchblog.com/ ) and is called 'Search Engines and Webmasters'. The changes have been rolled out and will take place incrementally over the coming weeks. "
As I posted in the Search Engine News Blog on Monday, November 29, 2004 re WebmasterWorld's Search Conference :: Yahoo! Presentations, the details of Yahoo's "fix" for the redirects problem was announced in Tim Mayer's Webmaster World presentation.
This is discussed on the official Yahoo! Search blog December 06, 2004 in the "Tim Converse Interview, part 2."
"YQ: What actually happens there? I've heard of companies who have used 301 redirects and yet their old pages continued to show up in the search engines anyway. Why is that?
A: The underlying problem is that people out there haven't changed their links and search engines do pay attention to links.
I can't give you a date, but we're changing how we deal with redirects. The thing about redirects is that everyone thinks it's obvious how a search engine should treat them and the obvious answer is not really that helpful. Any policy you develop with redirects is going to make someone unhappy but what we're about to roll out we will pay better attention to 301 redirects and the exact problem you're talking about should be less.
[In the time since we met with Tim, the team has rolled out a fix for 301/302 redirects. Documents will be handled by the new redirect policy as they are re-crawled and re-indexed and webmasters will start to see many of the sites change in the next couple of weeks. The index should be fully propagated within a month.]"
The Q&A session also has the following comments which may indicate which way YAhoo! is intending going with their search indexes and spam detecting formulae...
Tim Converse is quoted "The way we're approaching search itself has changed a lot.
The big things for us are "relevance," "comprehensiveness," "freshness," and "presentation." That's "RCFP" and it's kind of our mantra."
For instance, comprehensiveness is a much bigger deal these days. In the Inktomi days we wanted just one copy of anything that was good because serving documents costs so much. Now we'd really like to have everything.
JQ: ...that assumes there'll be a lot of junk?
A: You really want to put everything out there but then...Right and so then the challenge is identifying and appropriately ranking it all.
The big question is what effect, if any, this will have on Totaltravel listings ( not to mention rankings) on Yahoo!
In a related thread redirect problems at Google are discussed: Come on Google, Fix it !!!
Robert_Charlton writes to GoogleGuy - "Thank you.... That's an historic post... the first indication I've seen online that Google is looking at the problem.
I can't tell you how much this would have helped in the past year. From the 'outside,' when you're a webmaster and sending such info to Google, it's kind of like sending it into a black hole. You never know whether you've been heard.
Fortunately, I've been able to have all such links that have been affecting me removed, but I've been lucky that the links were from cooperating sites. I basically instruct clients to avoid links from any sites using redirects."
RC also suggests "that it would be helpful for Google to have a bug report request page with known or rumored issues posted, with suggested keyword identifiers. Otherwise, only those who happen to stumble across your posts, sometimes buried in a thread of several hundred, will know what's happening."
Here, here do I hear you all say?
posted by Jen @ 9:08 AM
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