Thousands of pages in Yahoo, but none in SERPs

site: query works but otherwise can't get them listed

[diamondgrl]

If I do a search for site:http://www.example.com/ for my site, I get thousands of pages listed. I don't find them all, but at least it finds a majority of them.

However, when I search for specific words on the page, I never find the pages in any of the SERPs, no matter how far I go. Only when I search a very very specific phrase and put it in quotes so that no other page on the web is likely to have the same result, does my page show up in the SERPs. Not surprisingly, I get almost no referrals from Yahoo (but plenty from Google).

Any idea why this is happening and how to get out of Yahoo search purgatory?