Sharad Verma announced the Yahoo weather report this morning:

Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we 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.

Speaking of shuffling, Yahoo may see 700 jobs cut from the deck soon.

When we first heard the news about X-Robots, we thought Chris Claremont might be writing a Sentinels as superheroes title for Marvel.

Our discussion of possible pencilers was cut short by the realization these were X-Robots-Tags, which webmasters can serve up to Yahoo’s crawlers. These directives allow the site publisher improved control at the page level of how content become indexed when Yahoo’s Slurp comes calling.

Sharad Verma posted samples of these on the Yahoo Search blog:

To take advantage of this feature, simply add the following page level tags to the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header. Here are a few examples:

 

X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

A trip to conferences like SES Chicago or PubCon would not be complete if a search site wasn’t doing some updating at the time. Here’s what Yahoo has going on:

Along with this change, we’ll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

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The weather report from Yahoo Search has been tempestuous recently. But the skies should be clearing soon.

Yahoo has been undergoing another update to the search system. This follows their Search Assist debut in early October.

But as we’ve heard many times, no good deed goes unpunished, and it appears the Yahoo Search team didn’t get to have their dessert after dinner. Yahoo acknowledged issues with their Site Explorer last week regarding inlinks, and have been working on the problem.

A broader update has been taking place as well, as the team noted on the Yahoo Search blog:

Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we 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.

We think everyone will be happy just to see the inlinks working as normal again.

Search Update Rolling At Yahoo

Priyank Garg noted at the Yahoo Search blog the present update taking place. Webmasters will want to keep an eye on this, and see if their rankings have changed. Garg also reminded everyone this update would be the first to take place after their launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer last month:

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result.

An early report about this at Search Engine Land cited Aaron Wall on a couple of issues he noticed – botched 301 redirects, and Yahoo’s algorithm placing more weight on the words in a domain name for ranking purposes.