Oct
25
Yahoo Update, October 24, 2006: Check your snippets!
Filed Under Yahoo | Comments Off
It looked like the index had been updated when I happened to look a little while ago, and sure enough there’s a “Weather Report” at the Yahoo Search Blog:
Yahoo! Search Weather Update and Support for ‘NOODP’
Some of us have grown to expect that the snippets shown in the SERPs will include the search term we’ve used, but there may be a surprise in store. The snippet shown for the first site I checked that indicated there had been an update does NOT include either of the words in the two-word search phrase, but the singular version of the “primary” word which was searched for in the plural, and not the “qualifying” word that’s descriptive of the main word, but a synonym for it. And the snippet was taken from the last part of the meta description.
There’s no conclusion that can be drawn other than that there’s some kind of semantic analysis involved with pulling the snippets.
Off to check more, will add any additional observations. This was just a first look, but an interesting one.
Added:
Just checking that same site for another search term, the interior page does have the exact phrase on the page and in the snippet, and is ranking at #7 for the 2-word phrase. But the homepage of the site is ranking at #9 and while the “modifying” word is on the page and is highlighted in the cache, the “main” word for the phrase isn’t on the homepage at all, yet it’s ranking for the two word phrase that pertains to an interior page.
Added October 27:
Checking listings for pages coming up for searches since this update, there’s no snippet showing for the some pages - only the page title and URL. Checking the code, those pages have no meta description on them, so it’s time to add them and see how long it takes for some kind of snippet to show up at Yahoo and where it’s pulled from.