High on Google, Low on Yahoo!

Why such a difference in rankings?

[blastboy88]

I am fairly new to SEO, and I have a question about what may be causing the differences between how Google and Yahoo are ranking my site.

On Google, my site is ranking 7th for a particular keyword. For the same keyword on Yahoo!, my site is ranking 95th. I am getting decent traffic from Google but nothing from Yahoo!. I didn't think that my rankings would be so different between the two search engines.

What would you more experienced SEO'ers do to determine what is happening with my Yahoo ranking? I would love to know what I can do to improve my Yahoo ranking without jeopardizing my Google ranking. Is this a common problem?

[SEngine Girl]

Typically, if you have good rankings on Google, your rankings on Yahoo will not be good, and vice versa b/c their algorithms are set up in two totally different fashions. Other then expereinced, large companies that have masterd the SEO world, it is fairly difficult to achieve good ranks on both at least in my industry. If you are currenlty placed well in Google, I would be content, based on the fact you will most likely recieve a lot more traffic from that good Google rank than you would with the same (or perhaps even better) Yahoo rank based on Googles current domination of the search world.

[Jack_Frost]

If your site ranks well in Google, but not Yahoo you might need to get a little more aggressive with you on page techniques "Title, desc, H1, keyword density, and FILE NAMES"

We, however, have noticed that a lot of our clients that have been optimized in the last 6 months are not doing real well in Yahoo. Their new search engine appears to be REAL slow at updating changes to sites. On the positive side, we have a lot of clients that have been holding steady in Yahoo since the new search engine was unveiled.

[mark1615]

Jack_Frost - What "FILE NAMES" are you talking about?

[funandgames]

Yahoo has made some serious changes in their SERPS the past few days.

[PatrickDeese]

Typically, if you have good rankings on Google, your rankings on Yahoo will not be good

Um. You might want to check a wider set of keywords. In general, for the more competitive terms, the top sites in G show up in Y - not always in the same order, necessarily - but I can probably find 20 SERPs with 500K+ results where 12 / 20 are the same between the two search engines.

[webmktg]

Yahoo has made some serious changes in their SERPS the past few days.

I think what Yahoo has done is switching back to an Old Database. I noticed old cache pages of my website in the new Yahoo results.

It is strange why Yahoo is doing this. It could be they are updating the Database and showing an old Database till they finish the update.

[8cool]

"I think what Yahoo has done is switching back to an Old Database"

Exactly correct!

It seems to be Yahoo Database got corrupted. There is no other solution unless they rebuild the Database.

Y! Its Better to hire Googlebot for few days and build it soon :)

[girish]

I hope you are right-

I was pos #2-#3 on keywords (2 million results) a few days ago and now I'm nowhere in the SERPS.

However, I'm wondering about this since Yahoo has been showing ~160 pages (of 2000 page site) in the index for about 3 months now -- and today they still show same number of pages. So how might using the old database cause my site to drop from the SERPs?

[ichthyous]

I have seen my traffic from Yahoo halve this month. I haven't done anything new to my pages. MSN has now passed Yahoo in bringing me traffic and last month it was less than half. My Google traffic has had a huge jump this month so far. Hopefully it's just an algo thing.

[quotations]

We, however, have noticed that a lot of our clients that have been optimized in the last 6 months are not doing real well in Yahoo. Their new search engine appears to be REAL slow at updating changes to sites.

Yahoo changed their rules and then went through a couple of months ago and did manual bans on a lot of sites.

If you can find the correct address to send to, they might reply with "Your site has been found to be inappropriate for inclusion in our index."

I got such a message for one site, did a complete re-design, sent a message to the address which they told me to and was re-included the next day.

If you have not read their terms of service and webmaster guidelines in the past 6 months, go read them again.

I have read them 6 times this week but that is another story.

[Jack_Frost]

The sites are not banned, they come up in Yahoo under some of their search phrases, just not many. The sites in question are targeting fairly uncompetitive search phrases with optimization techniques that are pretty standard (nothing different to what we've been doing for the last 5 years).

These are all corporate sites with only natural one way links. For example, one was a corporate site that we deframed and aligned the title tags, link structure, and other factors to be in line with the algo's...nothing fancy.

In speaking with the president of one of the big ecommerce store software sellers, I was told that the only real way to move up in Yahoo lately is through Site Match.

I guess my question is still unanswered. Anyone optimized a site with decent link pop in the last 6 months and have it do well in Yahoo SERPs?

Also for Mark, Yahoo has historically given some weight to having the keywords in the filename. For instance xyzcompany.com/fuzzywidgets.html Of course, we try to balance all of these factors out to avoid making the page "overoptimized."

[Lorel]

I also rank very high in Google with 95+% of my traffic from Google and I pay close attention to KW in title, headers, bold text and link text, etc.. However i have several clients that are doing very well in Yahoo/MSN and they are all image intensive sites, i.e., higher keyword density on their sites via their link text. I'm a prolific writer so high keyword density is hard for me to achieve on my own site. So you may want to check into Keyword Density for Yahoo/Msn.

[jaffstar]

I am also finding my sites are doing well in Google, and not so well in Yahoo, recently I found a site at #1 in Yahoo, which was a sneaky redirect, when I analyzed the site *before it redirected* I noticed it had kw denisty as high as 19%, this site did very poorly on google.

So it seems that there is no Win-Win, go for one or the other or get lucky

[caveman]

blastboy88, it is certainly possible to field sites that do very well on both SE's. A matter of balance. :-)

Regarding the Y problem, despite the fact that some top wm's in here have recently posted to the contrary, I actually believe that in some respects Y's dup filters are harsher than G's. It could be that you're pushing some strings too hard. The good new is, Y's dup filters are easier to figure out, so you might try looking there.

We have also found that you can sometimes make up for minor sins on G with the presence of other strong positives, whereas on Y! sometimes those minor sins will getcha...

I hate it when that happens. :o

[dupac]

Well i am sailing in the same boat. I changed nothing in the site, just normal upgradation of site and suddenly on 25th nov whole of the site is out of index and just the index page is there. Pretty weird how only the index page is in the index for everyone. At this time it doesnt seem manual penalty since lot of people are facing this problem but can't ignore that fact also.
Anyone with other thoughts as to why this changes occured in yahoo?
Also can yahoo guy also let us know as to whats going on?

[phantombookman]

yahoo=KWD
still a major part of their algo

Be very careful optimising for Y because you could be saying sayonara to Google