Oh, that this weren’t true. Last week, Yahoo made news by disclosing that it had quietly dropped support for the meta keywords tag. As a long time hater of that tag and the insane questions it has produced, I was thrilled! But today, I see conclusively that Yahoo still supports the tag.

The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word — xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk — generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed indexes the content of that tag. (And to be clear, I looked before writing this article. In short order, this article itself, along with others, will appear because they’ll make use of that word).

During the session last week at SMX East, when Yahoo said it no longer supported this tag, several in the audience said they didn’t believe it. I was kind of struck. You’ve got a search representative flat-out saying they don’t do something, but no one wants to believe them? How things have changed. Sure, I can see distrust on some controversial issues (such as whether Google really does not count nofollowed links out of Wikipedia). But why would Yahoo lie about something like meta keywords support?

To be clear, I don’t think Yahoo was deliberately lying. The representative was probably confused in some way. Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag (it’s not mentioned here) and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they recently blogged much advice about using the tag.

As I commented about this:

That reads like someone got a copy of really old SEO advice and decided to put it out there regardless of what Bing actually does. I mean, my head hurts, but not everyone cared about commas or not. And no one had this 874 character limit. I mean, if you went over, it was no big deal. And the don’t repeat more than 4 times? According to what. Microsoft never, ever had its own guidelines like this.”

It’s a good reminder to the search reps. In many ways, you occupy god-like status on issues relating to SEO. Everything you write, everything you say will be fully believed by some. And if you’re not correct, you’ll confuse people and cause others to lose faith in you. If you don’t know, don’t say — or qualify: “I’m not sure” or “I’ll check on that.”

Postscript: Yahoo’s sent me this:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

And then there were none. Yahoo has long been the only major search engine that supported the meta keywords tag. However, the search engine revealed today that like the other majors, it no longer supports it.

The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today. The search engines were all asked about their support of the tag. Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag — prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

Bing doesn’t support the tag. Google has never supported it and in fact clarified this again in a special post last month. See Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It for more about that.

NOTE: See our follow-up post, Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag.

The Yahoo Search blog just announced a “weather report” confirming earlier reports of a Yahoo update taking place.

Yahoo said they are “rolling out a web index update over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

So be on the look out for any major changes. The last confirmed update prior to this one was in June 2009, so it has been a bit longer than the normal monthly updates we expect from Yahoo.

The Yahoo Search Blog has announced an index and algorithm update, aka a “weather report.” Yahoo said, “we’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

I spotted this update a couple days ago via a WebmasterWorld thread, so now we have official confirmation. The last Yahoo Search update was in early April.

A little over a week ago we reported on the March ‘09 Yahoo Search update. Yahoo has finally confirmed the update with a weather report on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Dan Rampton from Yahoo Search said:

We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and 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.

I checked the forums this morning and found no new discussion around Yahoo Search. This implies to me that the update is over and I doubt we will see another update until the end of this month. I may be wrong, so keep an eye out on your Yahoo referrals and rankings.

SEOs and Webmasters are noticing major shifts in the Yahoo Search results over the weekend. I reported the threads discussing the changes at the Search Engine Roundtable and noted that Yahoo has yet to post a “weather report” on this update at the Yahoo Search Blog.

Yahoo promised that they would continue to provide “weather reports” on these algorithm and index updates, when they happen. I would expect to see a post from Yahoo today or tomorrow on this update. The update does seem fairly significant, based on what I see reported in the forums over the weekend.

I am fairly confident that Yahoo Search is currently updating their index and algorithm now. Dozens of webmasters and SEOs are noticing this update and discussing it at WebmasterWorld, but the Yahoo Search Blog has no mention of it.

Typically, Yahoo posts updates — which they call weather reports — when Yahoo is updating their index or shifting their algorithm. In fact, Yahoo was proud to grant Danny Sullivan’s wish back in 2005 for search engines to provide these weather reports. But Yahoo’s last “weather report” was in November 2008, three months ago. Typically, Yahoo does an update every month. So has Yahoo done away with the “weather reports?”

The past two or three updates did not receive “weather report” blog posts at the Yahoo Search Blog. But they did get mentioned at the Yahoo Japan Blog. In fact, you can read the translation of Yahoo Japan’s last weather report from the 25th. The same thing happened with the January Yahoo update, there was no blog post at the US Yahoo Search Blog, but there was on the Japan Yahoo Search Blog.

So this is my plea to Yahoo, please bring back the weather reports. At least open a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/ysearch (someone has it) and Twitter something.

Postscript by Matt: Hearing us loudly and clearly, Yahoo late today issued a weather report confirming that there are ongoing updates that should be “completed very soon.” Yahoo also says there have been two updates since the last weather report — one in December and one in late January. Thanks Yahoo!

The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

Multiple URLs, one page

Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort  through 1,000 URLs.

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value  the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google  reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.

If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.

The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:

• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good

Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same  content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).

While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.

This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz:

The search engines will be talking about this news at the Ask the Search Engines panel at SMX West. We will be blogging this panel live at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Many SEOs and SEMs have been noticing updates at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com this past week. I thought I catch you up on what has been noticed at each engine.

On the Google front, as reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, many webmasters noticed their PageRank scores drop. After a lot of discussion, concern and debate, Matt Cutts of Google commented explaining that the PageRank scores are fluctuating due to the canonicalization updates Google is pushing through. He said, as long as you are not selling links, “Don’t Panic.” These things will work themselves out and your rankings should not be impacted.

Google is not the only search engine people are taking notice of recently. I reported that webmasters are also noticing an update at Yahoo and even at Ask.com. Yahoo has not announced a “weather report” at the main Yahoo Search Blog, they have however announced it at the Japanese blog. Many are of the belief that Yahoo has done some sort of update and it is impacting search referrals for many. Many have also noticed that Ask.com did some sort of test update. This Ask update does not seem to be related to the super vertical push they are making, but rather an influx of Google ads into the listings. It is hard to say for sure, because only some are part of this test.

In addition, Google Blog Search continues to adjust their algorithms and indexing techniques. Some are reporting that Google Blog Search is failing to index their new blog posts, while others continue to complain about how they adapted to index the full text of the blog post.

That is a quick snapshot of what took place on the SEO front this week.

Yahoo has informed us that they will be rolling out a search update over the weekend. Yahoo said, that you can expect “some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon.” As always, expect the ranking to change, hopefully not too much and expect things to settle down over the course of a few days.

I have heard only one blip about a change at Yahoo in the forums, but that individual soon retracted his statement. So as of right now, it does appear nothing has yet changed or at least, no one noticed a change yet.