doing well in google, BUT

[April98]

Hi all,

I'm doing well in Google but I have a huge problem... I've all but disappeared from Yahoo! My Google rankings shot up a week or 2 ago for some great gift basket related keywords, but, at the same time, Yahoo seems to have dumped me or something!

Can anyone explain this to me?? Yahoo WAS giving me more traffic than Google. Now I'm not getting much from Yahoo at all. Is this because I haven't paid to be listed there?????

Thank you for any advice!

[jestep]

I dont think paying is going to change anything. Yahoo is currently making a lot of changes and I believe that you are seeing the result of this. I would wait a few weeks to see if your site possition goes back up. As long as you aren't doing anything that a search engine would consider unethical, then you should be OK. Once the results have settled out a bit in yahoo, you should take a look and try to figure out what yahoo wants to see to rank a site highly. I think that yahoo is just jumping around way too much right now to try to figure out what works with them at this moment.

[ADAM Web Design]

Not paying for Yahoo! will not influence them in any way, shape or form in terms of your site ranking; it will only influence Yahoo! in terms of your site inclusion. The basic premise behind paid inclusion is to submit and index those pages that may not otherwise be found and/or indexed by search engines in as timely a manner as possible.

In most cases, paid inclusion is not really all that beneficial. The only exceptions I've ever seen are short-term cases (e.g. a new product comes out to market and you want to get listed first). But personally, I try to avoid it whenever possible, opting instead to get rankings through long-term search engine campaigning ang permanent links.

[voasi]

The only time I find paid inclusion of any real value is when you have a site that is updated on a regular basis and needs to be re-indexed every 48 hrs.

Keep in mind that Google and Yahoo! are 2 different search engines...with 2 different algorithms. Optimizing for one, may be harming your rankings in the other. But if I would have to choose between which search engine to optimize for, it definitely would be Google, as they have about 52% market share of searches online and it seems to be climbing.

Continue to write and update articles, refresh pages with content, as well as continue link building using your anchor text and you should get your sites picked up again through Yahoo!.