{ 2008 03 13 }

Yahoo! Shoved A Red Hot Poker Up The Backside Of My Linkless Local Sites

Yahoo! recently said, we’re rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.” Is this to the detriment of the linkless local site?

2 Sites I manage that ranked well in Yahoo! for their industry+county disappeared. Both ranked consistently #1 or #2 for those terms in Yahoo! and now neither of them is in the top 100. On Google they are on the first page, though one of them floats in and out of supplemental as it is the company’s secondary site and is not even listed in any of the IYPs.

Some of the local sites I was competing with for those terms are still there but they are older and have link support. So, I am wondering if this represents a shift in Yahoo’s thinking about local sites in the main search results. Has the move to show more results from 3rd parties in local queries been accompanied by a more fundamental algo shift that places more emphasis on authority? Aaron Wall wrote about this nearly 2 years ago. Maybe that represents the lag time in local.

Anybody else noticing any changes to their ranking in Yahoo! over the past week or so?

Posted by Local Search Hound on Thursday, March 13th, 2008, at 12:17 am, and filed under Local Search, SEO.

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