It’s tax day, not April Fool’s Day, but Yahoo Slurp 3.0 is rolling out anyway and this is no joke. Yahoo Slurp 3.0 is said to include some infrastructure updates and will now respect the directives outlined in a website’s robots.txt file without modification to this file.

Webmasters will start to see the Yahoo Slurp 3.0 crawler appearing in log pages over the next few weeks. Yahoo recommends using a reverse DNS detection system to monitor Yahoo Slurp 3.0 as IP-based recognition will slow down to a crawl (literally). Webmasters who are using a Slurp 2.0 user agent will need to upgrade to the new ‘Yahoo! Slurp/3.0” user agent for accurate results.

Now, is Yahoo Slurp 3.0 responsible for the latest shakeup in the search engine’s results pages? This could be or it could be the lingering effects from the last Yahoo algorithm update that was reported on March 3 that was supposed to shake out after a week or two.

Perhaps it’s even a combination of the two. Now matter as Yahoo Slurp 3.0 is here to stay. Better get out your long straw and pull out your best convenience store joke as this would be a good time for it.

Filed under: Yahoo