Search Engines Clean Up

Don’t panic if you see your Yahoo page rank change, Yahoo Search recently underwent an index update.

by Helen Leggatt

The confirmation was posted last Friday by Priyank Garg on the Yahoo Search blog.

"We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began last night and should be complete very soon.”

Since the announcement, bloggers have been noticing strange content in Yahoo’s top rankings, including obvious spam content and incorrect links, something which has been seen during previous updates and which has been quickly resolved.

At the beginning of 2007, Google Search undertook its about once-every-quarter clean up with a backlink and PageRank update.

Backlinks, or inbound links from other websites, are crucial to website ranking and the update has resulted in many websites dropping off the Google index.

PageRank updates are comprehensively explained by Jessica Bowman of Search Engine Journal.