Yahoo ranking secrets

[achronister]

So you see, different, is GOOD ... It's like walking into stores and seeing the same thing in every store. After a while you get disgusted with the sameness and wonder what happened to uniqueness.

I agree, as long as both results remain relevant. If Yahoo is different than Google, but Yahoo is delivering junk no one wants, then it might as well be the same.

[kjohnson5576]

Thanks for the advice Red. I think between you and Asher02...payment to Yahoo in one form or another seems to get you where you want to go. Here is a theory that I have come to think makes a lot of sense:

SEO is good, but only to a point. We've all read about the need for links, backlinks, links without any attachments to our own sites in order to move up in the rankings. Linking is one powerful key to both Google and Yahoo. From my own experience with Google, I pay hefty amounts in advertising each month. Not only does this get me customers from the ads, but when I look into "pages that contain the term..." results in Google for my domain, I see far more. Google picks up pages that contain my ads and lists them as sites that contain the name...i.e. links? Just a theory still, but perhaps the math code they use, just perhaps, weights a site better in the organics because they use the google ads as links.

Could the same be true with Yahoo?

We've already heard that many rank great in Yahoo without payment, but in extremely competitive keyword catagories, is this still true?

I used Overture Ads for a brief period of time last December but that was before the big split. Perhaps now, I may try it again since Yahoo's organic results seem to be half way down the page behind all the paid results. I'm not sure if Yahoo's organic results are worth trying to SEO for if the listing is still half way down a page.

Also, a quick note on Yahoo. I use the SBC-Yahoo DSL service. The service is priced at about half that of competing cable and only $3.00 more per month than AOL dial up. A very affordable and popular service. What comes with this service is a complete browser home page swap for those who don't know to change their settings (like most internet users). So when they get into the internet, they automatically jump onto Yahoo's portal, use Yahoo's searches, Yahoo mail, etc. I know personally that many people are switching to this service throughout the country, which makes Yahoo search an extememly important place to be listed on.

With Google, I get many hits from AOL Search. AOL, for those who have used this ISP in their past, did exactly the same thing as Yahoo is now, essentially changing all the settings in a computer to be linked only to the AOL portal. And for most internet users, who know nothing about browsers, settings, etc and really don't want to know, AOL was the choice for everything. SBC-Yahoo just pulled a page from the AOL playbook to make their portal dominant at a lower cost. So Yahoo, I believe, is an important consideration for search whether any of us like it or not.

Long winded this morning, sorry.

[debase23]

I use multiple engines with nearly every search - mostly hunting down international businesses in the local language. I've found google is burping up more vague sites (anything remotely medical in any language turns up a webmd site even though the site does not feature anything remotely about the searched topic), and yahoo is stronger for international info. This could be due to brand recognition or international script techniques. Something to consider.

Also, if yahoo is so word happy, there's the old trick of misspelled keywords to get results to the QWERTY impaired...

[Dave Hawley]

Dave, sorry to hear that you have some bad experiences with yahoo, but you should pay more attention to it now because there is a slow but sure migration from Gg to yahoo

I'm not seeing this trend in my logs. In fact, the opposite. Most independent studies also concur with what I see.

Why do you say there is "slow but sure migration from Gg to yahoo"?

[eventor]

Dave wrote
"I'm not seeing this trend in my logs. In fact, the opposite. Most independent studies also concur with what I see.

Why do you say there is "slow but sure migration from Gg to yahoo"?


Hi Dave,
I am surprised that your logs are not showing referrals from yahoo increasing compared to Gg.
Out of five web sites that I am tracking, four of them do show more referrals from yahoo, especially since two weeks ago. The remaining one showed no apparent increase, perhaps due to its more technical keyword category. But it also could be due to the wheather? However, I will be keeping track of the trends and will update you all later.

www.aircoast.com

[edhan]

I do see the trend of people using Yahoo search more often than Google recently from logs on my sites as well as my clients. Seems like Yahoo is catching up.

Edward

[Dave Hawley]

You got me thinking (arrh it hurts :)) and think I know why.

I get about about 90% of my traffic from Google and Yahoo, with Google running around 85% and Yahoo 5%

Google has managed to eat up and rank many of my forum pages (recently switched to vbullentin). Yahoo doesn't appear to be able to, or doesn't want to (at least not yet).

If I do an allintitle:Excel Help & Excel VBA Help Forums on Google I get about 2,260 and on Yahoo only 256 :(

[cbp]

Google Trouncing MSN, Yahoo
Hitwise today released a massive study on search trends. The key learnings include findings that:
- Over the last nine months, Google grew traffic marketshare, while the other major search engines saw decreases. Google experienced net gains from both MSN and Yahoo, while MSN and Yahoo saw net losses of visits to Google.

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives...index.php?rss1

CBP

[Dave Hawley]

I would say that, unless the others learn how to freely deep crawl the Web the trend will continue. Their paid ads still look too simliar to the organic ones too.

[anablake]

Anchor text and their related links brought us into the limelight on Yahoo.

After reading Garrett's article Anchor Text Tips That Rocket Your Search Rankings and optimizing our site accordingly, we were all over Yahoo where we hadn't been found.

Now if we could only figure out why Google isn't hungry for ours anymore ;)

I'd suggest reading that article, it is excellent.

[bhartzer]

Yes, it's definitely a great article.

One of the SEO techniques I suggest is to vary your anchor text a bit so that it doesn't have the same anchor text everywhere. This will help in Google rankings, too.

In any case, you don't want it to look like you're over-optimizing anything, and varying your anchor text will help you stay "under the radar".

[leolucas]

I think Yahoo really cares about exact search word matches used in titles, text and links. I have positions 1 through 9 on Yahoo for one two word combination! That's a little nuts but I'm happy to have it.

Google seems more sophisticated. It seems to consider more items to get a general sense of the web pages. On Google, I usually appear in one of the 1-5 positions on the search terms important to me. Google seldomly gives me more than 2 positions in the top 10. The sites next to me have very similar content, are well optimized and have a ton on incoming links.

[Dave Hawley]

I'm hearing a lot about this variying of anchor text lately. Is this a fact or yet another unproven rumour that is perpetuating?

What would be the logic of Google frowing upon the same annchor text???? It certainly appears to have no effect on Microsoft, Ford Motors, DEll, Apple, Yahoo etc etc and ALL other big name brands.

[edhan]

We used to rank the same for Yahoo and Google. But now it is a total change. What we can only do is just creating our sites for visitors instead of solely optimizing SE. We believe that way will eventually help us to rank well someday.

Edward

[Dave Hawley]

We used to rank the same for Yahoo and Google. But now it is a total change.

That is likey because Yahoo was using Google SERPs but no longer do. This happend about 6 months ago,

What we can only do is just creating our sites for visitors instead of solely optimizing SE. We believe that way will eventually help us to rank well someday.

That's a very good approach IMO.

[rocos]

Yahoo and Google are all important!
Buy my list in these two SE are bad:(

[smakyyy]

i am doing better on yahoo, msn, and altavista but not on google dunno why - was doing good on google - got dropped- tehn all others picked me up.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by cbp

Google Trouncing MSN, Yahoo
Hitwise today released a massive study on search trends. The key learnings include findings that:
- Over the last nine months, Google grew traffic marketshare, while the other major search engines saw decreases. Google experienced net gains from both MSN and Yahoo, while MSN and Yahoo saw net losses of visits to Google.

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives...index.php?rss1

CBP

One key area in that report and a feather in MSN's cap is that MSN Search won in the categories of shopping, classifieds, travel and business - all high-value money makers.

Some of those are probably understandable, like Travel I would suspect. But Shopping? My lord that has to be a big plus for them and a real downer for Yahoo. I am wondering if that is because of the demographics of MSN which is more female (no flying objects please). Yahoo is 50/50 in this area, while Google is more male. Age and income seemed to be pretty much the same -- so the gender issue really stands out.

[trsiyengar]

Irrespective of gender and age, the one portion MSN stole the show is at Education & Entertainment. Quite naturally the youngsters are hangilng around NSN, may be because of its established brand name in this field!

[Ekaterina]

Seems to work for my site.

What a cute little tool!

[hawkdutt]

Yahoo Search Results: Very Interesting Insight
Google dropped but Yahoo & MSN Picked Sites.


We had developed 8 sites in June, 2003. After the Google Florida update, we lost all of them. Initially, we had done massive link exchange for all of them and cross linked them. That was probably the reason that Google removed these sites. Before the update, all of them were appearing with top slot rankings on Google.
We ignored these sites once they disappeared since we hardly had any more traffic on them. Since Yahoo was also being powered by google, there was no traffic on the sites whatsoever. MSN also dropped these sites. Why did these sites disappear from all engines?

We removed the entire cross linking a few weeks later and even deleted all the links pages. I.E, these sites only had inbound links from our link partners and we retained 70% of them since our link partners site owners never checked if their links were still on our sites or not.

Just two months back, we saw 2 of our sites come back to the Yahoo and MSN index since it is powered by its own search engine. But none of the other sites showed up in rankings, although they are in Yahoo’s index. These 2 sites not only showed up but have taken top slot rankings for their targeted keywords that as competitive as keywords for other sites.

We never gave any special treatment to these 2 sites. All the sites were treated equally and we never anticipated that these 2 sites would ever work.

Yahoo/MSN Q: What do we interpret from these results? Still trying to figure out how Yahoo & MSN engine works. Can’t find a definite clue. What is it that made these sites work on Yahoo? How does Yahoo work? And by the way, the same two sites have also shown up in MSN with top results. Why is MSN also showing similar results as Yahoo? From our 8 sites, only these 2 sites are working in Yahoo and MSN.

Google Q: None of these 8 sites have any traffic from Google. Though, some of them have showed up in google’s index after 6 months or so. But they do not appear anywhere on the least competitive keywords. A few sites have a fresh/new PR of 1-2. Earlier they had a PR of 5 but after the penalization, it went down to ZERO. Will these sites ever show up in GOOGLE SERPS? Should we abandon these sites and launch similar sites? And submit them freshly to google. (Ofcourse we have learnt how to avoid the sandbox).

Your feedback is much appreciated.