I keep getting bugs in my ear (or little birdies) dropping hints that Yahoo!'s organic search is predisposed against websites serving AdSense. That' s not to say that many sites serving the Google ads don't rank well at Yahoo!, but rather that Yahoo! has some negative associations with AdSense serving content and won't be as friendly as they should be.
I've heard this rumor two ways now - first (which I find less credible) is that the ranking algorithm at Yahoo! is biased (pushing AdSense content lower than it would be ordinarily). And second (which fits with some experience and seems the more likely of the two), is that Yahoo!'s Slurp won't crawl (or won't index) as much content as they would/should/could on large content sites serving AdSense.
Is there any truth to the rumors? My guess is that we'll never know for sure; but, it sure makes for high quality industry gossip... Your thoughts?
The end of them? Why? Where else will you go? I'm a fan of Clusty but it certainly does not compare in scale or accuracy.
This is a 100% business choice. They need to stay profitable AND offer something of value to the user. There are plenty of good content sites available that uses YPN and Adsense just like there are a lof of junk sites that use both. Let's not forget that YPN is relatively new as well and the junk YPN sites will catch up in time unless Yahoo does a better job of maintaining network quality. I think it's encouraging to see them terminating some accounts for poor performance but I do have to wonder when that will stop.
If I have two good friends in front of me and I can share a cookie with one of them. I'm going to choose the friend who might break off a piece and give it back to me. Cookies are tasty. Even between friends, it's just business.
And yes, I can hear some of you thinking I did it all for the cookie.
He did it all for the cookie. The cookie. So we can take that wookie and stick it...
If search engines start playing serp games it will be the end of them.
I will agree with that!
If it were my search engine, I certainly penalize any site running another search engines add product if it were easily detectable (and it seems to be).
But, I probably wouldn´t announce it to the world.
If this is true, Yahoo! is wrong to punish ANYONE who paid for an ad on Google... Why hurt someone for doing their best to get new customers in a fair and legal way?
My sites definitely rank better on Google than Yahoo...all have Adsense.
Only so many sites can be at the top positions. Im sure there are quality sites further down the serps that, SEO wise didnt make it to the top, that could take the adsense spammed sites top position in yahoos index without any surfer suffering for less quality search results. If i were yahoo i would probably do it. Why would i want to send free traffic to someone who works with my competitor when i had a bunch of others to choose from?
No argument, there - it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.
I have had the same thought as rand on a few occasions but then when you check deeper, you see that it is just much harder to rank in Yahoo! than it is in Google. Yahoo! is going social, which is the new frontier for viral spammers and I do not play those games.
I disagree with 100lists. One of the biggest sources of spam is the scrapper sites which are full of Adsense ads. If Yahoo is reducing the amount of adsense sites in their index then they will by default be cleaning up their index and providing better results. Yes, I know that there are some high quality sites that have Adsense, and that would have to be addressed, but I believe that a substantial portion of the Adsense accounts are not high-quality. The other part to the story is that if Adsense heavy web sites are not getting indexed (and visited) as much then this will have a major impact on Google's bottom line. I thought this would be a tactic that MSN would use to attack Google, but it sounds like it is Yahoo who is firing the shot across Google's bow.
Braveheart I agree with you 100%! I am forever filtering out sites built for ads from my directory's submission queue. I was just saying that there are going to be some good sites that will be ranked lower for having these ads. Yahoo are going to have to be careful with this if they do go ahead!
I am sure that they are not going to do this though...
I have a website that ranks VERY WELL on Yahoo for "free linux hosting" and that serves Adsense on lots of pages, with the number of quality websites using adsense on their pages, it would be foolish from Yahoo to un-index them or not index them well.
Now if its something the Yahoo Slurp is doing without them "engineering" it to do so, then I would say that it is possible, although my personal experience says otherwise.
Blog and pingers running a lot less adsense these days, I can tell you that at least.
I don't see any reason why Yahoo would not be experimenting with such filtering. You would have to assume that Yahoo is willing to push the limits and see how they can craft results that are meaningful to the user and ALSO are beneficial to their contextual advertising program. You'd also have to assume that Google is doing the same. It's just smart business.
Am I paranoid? Maybe. But I'll certainly be experimenting and testing this theory if I have some time soon.
There was a theory a while back about Yahoo dropping sites running Google Analytics either to stop Google getting too much data or because it made the pages load too slow.
None of this seems plausible to me.
IMO I think that they would be silly to do that; it would affect the quality of their results as there are many sites that have "quality" content. Ranking these sites lower would surely affect the number of regular users.
If they go ahead with this, it would affect the way we search for sites. "Do I want to search for sites that contain Yahoo! ads or Google ads?"