Yahoo Result Fluctuations Due to Testing

In a WebProWorld thread, one member asked:

Every morning I check both Google and Yahoo! for the search term 'part time jobs' and others and consistently come up in the top 5 search results in Google. Yahoo! results are all over the place. One day we can be #5 the next #17 and then back to #3.



The kicker is that everyone else that we compete with seems to stay consistent. What could we be doing wrong? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Well feedback came from YahooMike on this question:

One thing that might be causing changes in the results are tests. We do a lot of testing and with that sometimes results fluctuate.



Another cause might be changes to made to a site (ie: webmasters testing to see what will work best). These types of changes might cause results to fluctuate.

I will buy into the testing, but not the page revisions by the website owners. This would only be true if the page was being crawled and updated in the index on a regular basis. Getting crawled/recrawled is slow, and to have it included/updated in the index is slim odds at best.



My suggestion is that you watch your results fluctuate and wait for their testing to settle down. Make note of your final resting place, if it is higher, no problem. If it is lower, then make some minor adjustments. Before you do make adjustments however -- check their cache version of your page to make sure it is your current copy of your page and not an old one.



After determining that you are dealing with the current version of your page and making the necessary revisions, do no expect your results to change overnight. With Google, this can take anywhere from one day to a month -- maybe longer. In Yahoo's case it could take upwards of 8 weeks or more -- and in some cases never.