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Not only have I not progressed out of the 30 or so sites in the Yahoo! directory, but as new sites are added they are always in front (we are at the very bottom).
We rank very well in MSN, and fairly well in Google, just to give some idea of roughly where we are.
As noted we actively promote ourselves, yet some of the sites in front of us seem to do next to nothing, and some are certainly very young sites.
This is reflected in Yahoo! search as well, with us doing quite poorly compared to newer sites, and sites that could only be seen as semi-spam.
My question is simply, how do you promote yourself in Yahoo!? Our approach, backlinks, writing articles, original content etc., seems to have had little effect.
Let me give an example from my personal observations: I have some sites for experimenting. Well, they even cannot be called sites, since they consist only a single index page.
One of these single-page sites (registered last year) has a keyword in title and domainname for a highly competitive kw combination (230,000,000 results in Yahoo). My site has no backlinks, but it is at #12 while many sites with a good content and Yahoo directory listing are all below it. For example, a good site that I monitor with a good performance in Google and MSN is at #86. The site in question is 10 years old, has some +500 pages, and hundreds of quality backlinks from authority sites.
The stranger part is that Yahoo uses not the meta description, but the description in its listings. For example, although the page in question has the keywords, it is not included in the Yahoo description.
This may not be a coincidence. I have another single-page site with just a single backlink. It too has kws in title and domain name. It is at #13 for the target kw combination among some 2,500,000 results.