My Pages Confuse Yahoo!

Wrong pages in the SERPs

[Vec_One]

My site has a few thousand pages. Although there are no duplicate pages, many have similarities, especially in the anchor text, titles, headings, and descriptions.

EXAMPLES
Page 1: Little Green Widgets
Page 2: Little Brown Widgets
Page 3: Little Blue Widgets

My site does fairly well in Yahoo SERPs. The trouble is that the wrong page usually appears. A search for "Little Green Widgets" is likely to bring up the "Little Brown Widgets" page.

I'd like to make it easier for Yahoo to identify the correct pages but I don't know where to start. Should I concentrate on link development, on-page factors, anchor text of internal links, or what? Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Even_Steven]

Oh, didn't you know? Spiders are color-blind. Sorry!

Instead of pulling your hair out over getting the right color to show up in Yahoo's SERPs, try adding links to other colors in each of your color pages. Thus, be happy that Yahoo is giving you good rankings, and try to deal with directing your vistors to the appropriate color through on-page navigation links.

I'm a firm believer in being happy. :) If you try to make things perfect, more often than not, you'll just end up losing everything. So, if you're getting good rankings for your pages, don't mess with it.

[Vec_One]

Even_Steven, I'm not actually getting any traffic because the wrong pages are always displayed.

I already have good internal linking - perhaps too good. Another site in one of my niches often gets the first 50 or 60 positions and it has minimal internal linking. I wonder if my anchor text confuses Yahoo.

Google, MSN and AdSense don't have any trouble figuring out what my pages are about. It seems to be a Yahoo glitch.

[dynamite]

Vec_One
Focus on those titles and metas. Yahoo will come around. Look at the page that is ranking well and see who is linking to that page and what they're using in the anchor text. Find some comparable sites to link to the right pages with the right anchor text and it will come around.

You might be ranking for a directory listing, if so you'll need to get some good links to the right pages to outweigh that listing.

Avoid duplicate filler content. Try to use different sentences to describe your little green widgets than you do your little blue widgets, Don't just plug the two into a template of text.

Try “small” green widgets and “little” green widgets in the anchor text linking to you as well.
If little brown widgets looks just like little green widgets you'll rank for little widgets and the page with the best links will rank; hence little brown widgets anytime someone searches Little (any color) widgets.

Use Little Widgets for your index page from time to time as well. The more importance your little widgets page carries, the more importance your sub pages will carry. Build up the links on the index first and then equally split the links to sub widgets.

Good luck. Your best bet is to make each page as unique as possible and get unique anchor text in the inbound links to each page.

[Vec_One]

Yahoo seems to be identifying my pages with much more accuracy now. I'm doing fairly well in the SERPs and the correct pages appear more frequently than before.

I suppose it might just be a matter of time. I've found that Google also gets confused with new pages. For a few days or a week, it will show pages linking to the new page, instead of the correct page. From my limited personal experience, Yahoo seems to do the same thing, but over a longer period of time - like a year.

I'd like to now what causes this phenomenon. If everything on my page is about little green widgets, why would a search engine take anywhere from a week to a year to understand that it's not about little blue widgets?

[martinibuster]

>>>why would a search engine take anywhere from a week to a year to understand that it's not about little blue widgets?

It takes two to dance.