Last week I reported that Yahoo Search posted on Twitter that it will be making search cool again. As I posted on Search Engine Land yesterday, we got more evidence that Yahoo is really moving forward with improving its search service.

Last night, Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo (more about him below), responded to Greg Sterling and myself about Yahoo getting into search:

Greg, I think you and Barry know – there are always new ways around the mountain. No reason to go straight at it. But we’re excited to start exploring again…and will be patient figuring it all out.

— Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) January 31, 2023

So yes, we got that tweet that I covered last week, followed by a number of other tweets:

Just popping in to remind everyone that we did search before it was cool.

BRB making it cool again.

— Yahoo Search (@YahooSearch) January 20, 2023

But we got a lot more – we have a job listing for a Principal Product Manager, Yahoo Search. The job listing says, “We’re looking for a Product Manager for Search at Yahoo. We are looking for folks that are interested in pushing beyond the status quo to change the way folks interact and use search.”

Jim Lanzone, who was the CEO of Ask.com and worked for several years for Ask.com (previously Ask Jeeves), who is now the CEO at Yahoo. He is a search guy, originally, and I do suspect he will want to do big things again with search. Under Jim, Ask released some incredibly innovative features, like Ask 3D – which Google kind of ripped off with its Universal Search – as some say… So I think, Yahoo Search, under Jim Lanzone might be an interesting Yahoo Search to look at.

As I also said on Search Engine Land, Brian Provost, SVP & GM, Yahoo posted on LinkedIn about this job listing and wrote, “There’s going to be so much innovation in Search in the coming years and there aren’t many places where you can immediately have an impact this big. Would love to hear from you if you have a passion for Search and building product experiences.”

This is exciting – I suspect it will take a year or so to see anything – but I am looking forward to it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about if you should worry about spammy from porn sites and if they can cause bad for ranking in Google Search.

In short, Lizzi Sassman from Google said not really. She said, “This is not something that you need to prioritize too much since Google Systems are getting better at figuring out if a link is spammy.”

This is similar to what John Mueller of Google said in 2016, saying “Adult sites aren’t automatically spam, and links from them not automatically unnatural / problematic.” Of course, the question here is that we know the links are spammy and from adult sites. The question before was, the links were from adult sites and not necessarily spammy.

The question was asked and answered at the 5:20 mark in the video:

Here is the transcript:

Are spammy links from porn sites bad for ranking?

Anonymous is asking, I’ve seen a lot of spammy back links from porn websites linking to our site over the past month using the Google Search Console link tool. We do not want these. Is this bad for ranking and what can I do about it?

This is not something that you need to prioritize too much since Google Systems are getting better at figuring out if a link is spammy. But if you’re concerned or you’ve received a manual action, you can use the disavow tool in Search Console. You’ll need to create a list of the spammy links and then upload it to the tool. Do a search for disavow in Search Console for more steps on how to do this.

Later on in the video, there is a question about disavowing links in general. Google has downplayed the importance of disavowing over the years and this is related to this question, so here is that transcript:

Will disavowing links make my site rank better?

John: Jimmy asks, will disavowing spammy links linking to my website help recover from an algorithmic penalty?

So first off, I’d try to evaluate whether your site really created those spammy links. It’s common for sites to have random, weird links, and Google has a lot of practice ignoring those. On the other hand, if you actively built significant spammy links yourself, then yes, cleaning those up would make sense. The disavow tool can help if you can’t remove the links at the source. That said, this will not position your site as it was before, but it can help our algorithms to recognize that they can trust your site again, giving you a chance to work up from there. There’s no low effort, magic trick that makes a site pop up back afterwards. You really have to put in the work, just as if you did it from the start.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn. This time he said, “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.”

Yes, this is probably super obvious to most of you reading this site but Gary dives a bit deeper.

He said, “Among other things, search engines use the HTML of your pages to make sense of the content. If for example you break up paragraphs, remove H tags in favor of CSS styling, or add breaking tags (especially true for CJK languages), you change the HTML parsers’ output, which in turn may change the site’s rankings.”

In short, when redesigning, sure – go ahead – make the site pretty. But changing the core HTML can result in ranking changes.

Gary recommends, “try to use semantically similar HTML when you redesign the site and avoid adding tags where you don’t actually need them.”

So if you can change the design but at the same time keep things in the HTML looking similar, that is your best bet. Change a lot without changing a lot – if that makes sense.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.