Another Yahoo! Search Update - Should You Care?

Yahoo! recently announced another update to its search index. With the announcement, comes the usual warning "you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index".

Yahoo! conducts these updates almost monthly, and as Yahoo!'s reputation has steadily declined over the past months, it seems the "care factor" on these updates has suffered a similar fate.

So, should you care when Yahoo! undertakes a re-shuffle of its search index?

YES, well maybe!

Sometimes its easy to get caught up in the pessimism of the industry and make judgments based developments that don't really matter to your business (e.g. what jerry's doing at an exec level).

At the end of the day, the importance of Yahoo! updates is directly related to Yahoo!'s contribution to your website and business. Whether you like Yahoo! or not, if it's sending you valuable traffic - then you're crazy to ignore index changes that could impact your website's performance.

Having just reviewed the ineedhits' traffic data for June, I know that Yahoo!'s US Search index delivers over 19% of our organic traffic. That's still a significant proportion of our overall SEO traffic volume. Enough to warrant a cautious eye over each update.

While Yahoo! is still well and truly over shadowed by Google - it's still the "next best thing" and really shouldn't be "totally" ignored. While the updates are often, only minor - you never know when a certain tweak will be your undoing.

On several occasions, we've seen our Yahoo! Search Submit Basic clients suffer significant traffic drops at the hands of a Yahoo! index update. So, ignore them at your own peril.

For those of you who do care, here's some of the feedback on the update from the forums:

"I lost 40 percent of my YH traffic two days ago and pages per visit plummeted to 1.2 for the remaining traffic."

"I'm seeing some bouncing today as well. Appears that some test pages of mine are ranking better due to anchor text."