Doing well in Google - Lousy in Yahoo

Is it Possible to Manage Rankings in Yahoo AND Google?

[suidas]

I have a site that gets ten times as many referrals from Google as it does from Yahoo.

Some factors:

* The site delivers around 1.5 million HTML pages/mo.
* The site is old, content-rich, non-spammy, non-commercial (has Adsense) and topically diverse.
* The content is largely detailed reviews of sites and books, a classic "authority site."
* Largely people do NOT visit the home page, but sub-folders that are effectively subsites. This has benefits (people often link to multiple topics) and drawbacks (there is little topic-to-topic audience spill-over). Alas, it's too late to change this strategy.
* I do not particularly optimize for Google. They just like me.
* I do engage in link promotion with like-minded sites and individuals. This is always about zeal, not money, with no explicit quid pro quo. I have been very successful at getting links from high-authority institutions (magazines, newspapers, the IPL, Scout Report, etc.)

I am very successful in Google, but a Yahoo failure. I'm #1 for a half-dozen topics in Google, but only one in Yahoo. For many topics Yahoo hardly lists me. I feel unloved!

How can I, over time, turn my Google success into Yahoo success, without killing the Google goose?

[SEOQuestions]

I am in the same boat. I rank well in Google and the new MSN (top three) but I am on page 4 for Yahoo. The site is an authority site, no spam, active spider friendly forum so lots of new content, good back links, about 17,800 pages indexed in Google. There is a fair amount of overlap between the search results for the two search engines but I am ranking very poorly in Google. Are there specific things one should think about when optimizing for Yahoo?

[fiu88]

I have the exact opposite....rank well in Y , poorly in G....our site is e-comm selling brand name products from only 1 manu....
all dynamic product pages are even #1,2 in Y....

[markis00]

I do very well in Yahoo, but completely lousy in Google

I think a while ago when Yahoo switched to their Ink results, people started to question whether or not optimizing for both engines would be possible.

Now they have their own algo, which is a lot like Ink, but different. I manage to do well on Yahoo through using Ink optimization tricks, but in doing so, I do lousy on Google.

This basically goes back to making a multi-engine friendly site - is it possible? There might be some people out there that manage to do well on both G and Y, so maybe wait for them to post something here.

[SEOQuestions]

I'm curious -- how are you folks that ranks well in Yahoo but poorly in Google doing with the new MSN results?

[fiu88]

SEO....
I never really check MSN often...your question prompted me and, lo and behold, we rank more or less as well as on Yahoo...

I think I'll leave the site as is ...and just create another one for G....

[markis00]

One of my sites that is listed 6th on Yahoo for a medium competitive keyword phrase is listed 3rd page on msn

My one site that holds two number 1 keyword phrases on Yahoo (somewhat competitive but was easy to get spots) is the same on MSN.

I'm looking at plain msn.com so I'm not too sure if those are the old or new search results I am looking at right now...

I should check up on my logs and see if I'm getting a lot of traffic from MSN or not. Last time I checked it was only a percentage of the total traffic I was getting from Yahoo though, and a very small percentage at that

[markis00]

To me, predicting MSN's placements is difficult. I honestly don't know what their algo is currently based on. Especially their new one

[baze22]

I'm curious -- how are you folks that ranks well in Yahoo but poorly in Google doing with the new MSN results?

With 2 sites I started in mid 2004, I'm finding that I do pretty well (page 1 or 2) in Y & M (new especially) and can't find myself in the top 500 in G. Frustrating.

baze

[travelin cat]

We do very very well in Google and have almost as good positions in the new MSN, we are almost nowhere to be found in Yahoo....

Even though we have great placement in MSN for most of our phrases/keywords, we get a small fraction, maybe 15% of the traffic and almost no conversions in MSN compared to Google...

FYI, we are in the travel biz and have a specific specialty that allows us to be very specific about our seo.

[is300]

Yes, i do good in google, perfect in msn, and am nowhere to be found in yahoo. I've even got my static url's submitted to overture's paid inclusion program too.

I was hoping to get some advice on how to overcome this. It seems we're all in the same boat with similar case studies.

[kevinpate]

> Possible to Manage Rankings in Yahoo AND Google

kw1 kw2 (99.5% info site, non-dynamic) shows as:
Google: #2 of 5.64 million
Yahoo: #1 of 3.03 million
MSN-new: #4 of 0.74 million
(msn beta was down beyond #50 to begin with,
don't know what exactly changed except it
wasn't deliberate on my part)

[soapystar]

Yahoo use comment tags in their headers filled with keywords. Not sure if its done because they know something or just for inhouse purposes.

<!-- Keywords:

Would be interested if anyone has seen an effect with that.

[Lorel]

I manage 25 sites. those that do well in Google are content intensive, i.e., lots of text on each page and the keywords in titles, headers and highlighted text. Those that do well in Yahoo are similar except they have a lot of pictures with very little keyword rich text, i.e., high keyword density.

[SEOQuestions]

What is the current thinking as far as keyword density in Google? I really cut it way back after Florida a few years ago.

[2_much]

I have a few sites that rank well in both Yahoo and Google, but the vast majority rank well in one or the other.

The main criteria with Yahoo is quantity of links from a variety of domains. The main criteria with Google (or one of them) is quality of links from categorical domains. Anchor text has to be varied in Google, but not so much in Yahoo.

I think it's possible to rank well in both.

My suggestion would be to accrue a large number of categorical links. Focus on Google, and you'll get Yahoo too. Make sure you have exact anchor text for your target keywords repeated a few times, but the density shouldn't be too high. Then go on to the next target kw. You'll have to pick your top 4-5 keywords, and use those in the anchor text.

Also, perform a few searches in Google and Yahoo, find the sites that rank well in both, then analyze both their on-page and off-page criteria. The on-page should be kinda high, especially the title density, but not too high that it'll trigger filters in Google.

The best advice is, find the similarities, research, replicate.

Marcela

[soapystar]

i often wonder if Yahoo editors simply look at the google serps for money terms and penalise the top ranked sites that dont meet their criteria. This would achieve their goal of removing their version of low quality sites that are high achieving while at the same time ensuring their own results for the same terms are a real alternative to google...this would easily explain why sites that do well in google will never do well in yahoo on certain terms.

just a thought.....

[martinibuster]

That's an interesting bit of speculation. How about this:
Google relies more on anchor text data than Yahoo does. Yahoo gives more credence to on page factors.

In Google there is the so-called sandbox, or at least some kind of link threshold, competitive serp threshold or whatever you want to call it, that is keeping the serps less fresh than Yahoo's serps.

Because Yahoo serps are fresher than Google's, you might see more bouncing around as new sites enter the mix.

Then there's the whole Allegra thing...

I think there's a bit of intellectual laziness in the idea that Google serps represent what the web is, and if Yahoo or MSN don't show the same results, there must be something wrong with Yahoo or MSN.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

[nzmatt]

I think I'll leave the site as is ...and just create another one for G....

Good luck... :)

[Lorel]

"I think I'll leave the site as is ...and just create another one for G.... " = supplemental results penalty

[ichthyous]

I had many pages indexed and awesome traffic from Yahoo until November of last year, then it vanished completely. Almost all of my indexed pages were dropped. This coincided with my not renewing my link in the Y! directory. Has anyone else seen this happen? MSN crawls my site nonstop and has more pages indexed than either G or Y, but very little traffic. Google, on the other hand has been delivering more and more traffic to my site, more than compensating for my Y! losses. As it currently stands Google brings in 82% of my traffic. To me that is alarmingly high and i would much prefer to have a more balanced traffic breakdown. I was wondering one thing about MSN and Y! though...I have NOARCHIVE tags on most of my HTML pages, but not my dynamic pages. Does anyone think that these HTML pages may be penalized by Y! and MSN? I think that may be what is happening. Since my site has been in the Google index for much longer than the other two I guess Google hasn't penalized me. I think both Y! and MSN are penalizing sites using these tags.

[soapystar]

my site is banned by yahoo but they still invite me to renew my directort listing which i did for reasons i wont go into...so myself and many others are not saved a yahoo penalty by being in the directory...however ive seen others post here that coincindetally they seem to have overcome a penalty by NOT renewing a listing...so..where does that leave us..well with some saying when they were in the serps and dropped the directory they seemed to get penalised...some saying when they WERENT in the serps and dropped the directory they got BACK in the serps...and others that are in the directory and have reincluded themselves having seen no correlation with an affect in the serps.....

all makes sense huh?

[itisgene]

I created four new sites since April 2004. And of course I don't have resources to get around the Sandbox on Google. Two of them are ranking well both on Yahoo & MSN. One is doing pretty well only on MSN. The last one (1 week old) is picking up the traffic from MSN. I get only less than 1% of traffic from Google for those sites.

My older sites are doing well even in Google so, I guess it should be just sandbox for those new sites.

[asbjoern]

Well it is really interesting to hear about people’s experiences with Web Yahoo Search, here is another question for you.

My search term is doing really well on Google (top 4) and my page is #4 on both with and without 's eg. car and cars. The weird thing is that on yahoo my page ranked 3ed with the search term with s but 15th when you apply the s.
Has anyone had similar experiences, and do you have any suggestions as to what to do about this?

Thanks

/asbjoern