A lot of people seem to be seeing an increase in traffic coming from Yahoo! if this thread at WebmasterWorld is any indication. Some credit this to a September update to Yahoo!’s Search Index, and sure enough, today Yahoo! announced just that. Sharad Verma at the Yahoo! Search Blog says:
We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.
Not that the update is being covered very heavily, but people seem pretty happy with it so far. “I have yet to see people complaining about the update – so this is an early sign of a positive update,” says Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land.
The fact that people are seeing an increase in traffic puts a better spin on this update than the one they rolled out in August. There were a number of complaints about loss of traffic after that one.
I have to wonder if the Yahoo! News redesign will be launching within the next few days as well to coincide with the update. It looks about ready to go, although it is receiving a bit of light criticism itself (Chris Snyder at Wired wonders if a “Twittered About” section would be more appropriate than a “Most Blogged” section).
Yahoo! has not made any announcements about when the redesign will roll out, or if it even will for that matter, but it would be an improvement if you ask me. I think most bloggers would agree.
