A Reflection on Yahoo Search Results

Yahoo, MSN and obviously Google are the three major search engines, which have redefined online industry in multiple ways. As a matter of fact, we can not think of surfing in the web without them. When a user seek an information online, one needs to type related keywords in the search box. It has been observed that most of the major search engines present the search result by exploiting its complicated algorithm. A search engine usually presents the titles of websites in SERP either from the meta-title, meta-description, heading tag or from the entire body content. This is an well established fact and this rule is strictly followed by SEO executives for optimizing their websites.

Have you ever imagined what will happen if this rule is not followed accordingly? We have faced similar type of problem and this is what we are going to share. Yesterday (18/12/08) we tried to check the ranking of our website by typing the keyword “Web Design India” in some of the leading search engines. We have not find anything weird either in MSN or in Google.com. However, when we started checking the ranking of our website with this keyword in Yahoo.com, we found that our website (//www.webguru-india.com)have grabbed 5th position but with a different title “Website Design Company”. Then we started searching that particular title in our webpage (//www.webguru-india.com/website-design-services) but it was not there. We have checked the meta title, meta description, meta keywords and even in the entire body content but failed to pinpoint the source of the title “Website Design Company”. This is really strange. We have tried our level best to find out the exact reason behind it. Some of us came up with the conclusion that Yahoo.com might have used some other source for displaying the website title in its SERP. If this assumption is taken for granted then the Yahoo’s effectiveness may come under the scanner. We have failed to come up with a conclusion or to fix this thing from happening. The only thing we can do is to hope for the best.

If you have the answer that can explain strange behavior of Yahoo then please let us know. We would be glad to get positive feedbacks from you.