Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen much discussion around fluctuations in Yahoo’s search index recently, but maybe some significant changes are coming soon?

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

Back in October, Google went a step further and announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains. On Thursday, Parthasarathy said Bing has no current plans to follow suit, while Bhattacharjee said Yahoo is exploring the possibility of cross-domain canonical tag support.

We actually expected this to be announced. I was tracking a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were noticing ranking changes at Yahoo Search. So now we have confirmation.

Yahoo said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!