Yahoo Search typically does a search update once a month. Yahoo has announced last night that they have pushed out a new update that may result in "ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."
Did we, the Search Engine Roundtable, miss early signs of this update? Possibly. I was tracking a thread at WebmasterWorld started by senior member, BillyS, who noticed a major traffic surge via Yahoo for a very short amount of time. On May 23rd, he reported major changes but then on the next day, May 24th, he said things were back to normal. I kept watching the thread but no new updates came about. Those were our early signs, but it seems not much came of it.
In the new WebmasterWorld thread, the only thread in the forums I track to discuss the update, only one member said she noticed changes. WebmasterWorld legend, Marcia said:
Haha! they *accidentally* put a site of mine at #8 out of 83 million (earlier today and late yesterday) and now it's sitting #9 out of 98 million pages returned. This update will be interesting to watch.Trust me, it's an accident. ;)
That implies to me that Yahoo ranked a site that doesn't deserve to rank well.
The last Yahoo Search update, the Yahoo Tax Day update was much more visible then this one. But the March update was more like this update, where no one noticed anything much.
Is this a good thing? I.e. a good thing that Yahoo is making changes to their algorithms and index and at the same time, SEOs are not noticing those changes?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
