TheSkepticGuy - 1:40 am on Apr 4, 2007 (gmt 0)

In March, I received more referrals (9,187) from an old deep-link in a website that receives about 6 million monthly visits, than I did from Yahoo.com (8,712). (707,884 from Google)

originally posted by martinibuster could Yahoo, in this set of SERPs, be favoring pages with less obvious signs of optimization

After some analysis of the words where we're not appearing at all, there seems to be some evidence to support this. Our pages a structured well, with descriptive links, directories, document names, titles, H-tags, etc. Most of the top-returns on Yahoo are an HTML mess.

originally posted by martinibuster if it's lucrative and relevant for them to be in the SERPs, then they may have spent time optimizing their site for the term, or they just got lucky by not optimizing so much as dancing around the term.

One of our leading pieces of content is coverage of a recent news story at O'Hare airport. We get significant traffic with great returns from Google, Google news, MSN, AOL, etc. But you simply can't find it by searching in Yahoo. How could these sites have spent time optimizing for breaking news? I don't think so.

originally posted by martinibuster Anyone seeing an abundance of dot edu or gov sites listed in those SERPs?

In our cases, no. The content we have is not typically covered by those TLD's.

originally posted by willybfriendly Age of domain is definitely a factor, as far as I can see

Our domain is 10 years old... so it's not helping us here. ;)

originally posted by willybfriendly I'll accept the Google traffic and treat anything from Yahoo to be "a pleasant surprise," for lack of more explicit words.

I'd accept a similar explanation if our site always performed terribly with Yahoo... but it hasn't. This time last year, Yahoo sent nearly 200,000 visits a month, which means we're at about 5% of what it used to be. They tell us we're not penalized, but the raw numbers certainly look that way.