Yahoo Ranking Changes Affecting My Ranking?

[lightning]

Last year my site, www.lightning-mortgage.com, had grown to the point where a flat structure bacame too unwieldy. So I moved my pages to multiple subdirectories, redirected searches from old pages to the new ones, and issued "301 Moved Permanently" messages to outdated requests.

Google picked right up on the changes and updated their databases. Still, I was ranked lower than I had on Yahoo and MSN. In fact, most of my traffic came from those two search engines.

About a month ago I noticed a sudden change. Google seems to rank my site higher, however, the amount of traffice coming from Yahoo and MSN seems to have dropped like a rock. At the same time I've also noticed that the 404 errors to the old names (which in turn resulted in a 301 message back and a auto redirection to the real page for the user) has dropped off.

Can someone offer any advice as to what I can do to regain my Yahoo rankings?

Thanks,

[brian.mark]

Our experience has shown that Yahoo is slow with 301's. They see them quickly, drop out the old page, but then are very slow to index the new page. About the only suggestion I have is a deep linking campaign where you go get some external links to the new internal pages.

MSN's freshbot was hitting our site earlier today, so maybe they'll have some of your moved pages in their index soon (if it is also hitting your site).

Brian.

[lightning]

Brian,

The problem is that I have over 150 pages. It would take quite a long time to get external links to each one of the pages.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Yahoo has indexed the pages. Slurp comes by every day. My problem is that the pages are ranked very low in comparison to Google and what they used to be on Yahoo.

-Tony

[brian.mark]

Our problem was with getting them indexed. We have over 15,000 pages which created a lot of challenges when we moved over 1/3 of them.

Getting rankings back seemed like it just takes some time. Our experience has been a day or two of good rankings followed by a month or two of reduced rankings, then a general climbing action and ending up close to where we were before.

Keep in mind that your competitors are probably working to improve their site, so while you were out of the rankings they probably improved their site to make it harder for you to climb back up. Also, they've had some recent algorithm changes that have shaken up quite a few SERPs in many industries. It may be time to make some changes to those pages.

In many cases, time is the best medicine for an ill search ranking. If it is costing you a lot of money in lost sales then some serious link building may be in order - or resort to PPC. Since they don't update their index as regular as some other engines, it may take a while.

Brian.