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My site is DMOZ listed, it has around 10 very quality inbound links and 30 DMOZ scraped links.
I have been careful not to over optimise my pages, title tags and heading tags do not match completely and internal links use varied anchor text.
My site has thousands of pages, each has about 30 links at the bottom to other related internal pages.
My site has no external links to other sites, something I am going to change soon.
My site runs Google Adsense, and is not listed in the Yahoo directory.
I would appreciate any information as to why I don't rank in Yahoo, and suggestions on how to start getting traffic from Yahoo without jeopardising my Google rankings. I would especially like to know if people think it would be worth me paying for a Yahoo directory listing.
Many thanks
I know that DMOZ helps fuel Google listings. I believe that a Yahoo directory listing helps to fuel Yahoo SERP's in the same way. But I'm not 100% sure of this fact.
Some people here would argue that Yahoo is losing it's place in the Search Engine world to Google and that it's not even worth wasting time on optimizing for MSN or Yahoo these days. That's what's keeping me from paying the yearly fee at the moment.
Thoughts anyone?
[edited by: Andy217 at 11:13 pm (utc) on Nov. 26, 2006]
From what I've read on this and other forums, paying for inclusion in the Yahoo Directory has almost no effect on getting listed there. Still, if your site makes thousands or millions of dollars per year, maybe the $300 fee is worth it just in case?
I'd be interested to hear if anyone here was doing well in Yahoo before July, then found themselves largely out of Yahoo, then managed to get back to their previous ranking. It's not worth sacrificing Google ranking to do so, but maybe making another site that is optimized a different way is an option?
I've spent the last year at the top of Google for my four primary key phrases (20m+ results in google, two word phrases)
In Yahoo and MSN, I'm not in the top 300.
No idea what Yahoo wants!
Site has several thousand pages of unique content, nothing for sale, all content free, visitors love it, Google loves it.
Yahoo and MSN? Nope. They hate it.
Any advice?
I've spent the last year at the top of Google for my four primary key phrases (6-10m+ results in google, two word phrases)
In Yahoo and MSN, I'm not in the top 300.
No idea what Yahoo wants!
Site has several thousand pages of unique content, nothing for sale, all content free, visitors love it, Google loves it.
Yahoo and MSN? Nope. They hate it.
Any advice?
now what I have learned about yahoo / msn:
a) all the top ten in my key word research are over 1 year old
b) all have blog referrals
c) all have massive internal links ( cross-linking like crazy )
d) all have a similar inbound to outbound link ratio
e) all have over 25 pages of content
my goal is just to try to get to the 20th ranking by summer time.
how am I going to do this, following steps b, d, e
i figured that those steps can not hurt.
I've been pondering this for a few days. I've got a lot of data, but I'm not sure which of it is relevant.
My (client's) site has about 1000 pages and ranks well in Google for a number of very competitive terms. Client bought the site about a year and a half ago, and history before then is murky. We just started working on the site for them.
Looks like Yahoo! traffic started tanking around mid May of this year. Google traffic has been growing slowly and steadily during the same time.
Here are some high level observations. I can go into more detail if anyone thinks these clues are worth chasing:
- I'm not aware of any punishable techniques. Doesn't mean they're not there, but I haven't found them.
- they seem to have done a proper 301 redirect from non-www to www for the domain, but I still see some non-www URLs (*instead of, not in addition to, the www version) in site explorer. I don't think there's a good timing explanation (far as I can tell, the ones that are in the index are similar in age, and the redirect was done a while ago, so all URLs should have been handled in a similar time-frame, right). Significant?
- there are about 75 of the 1000 pages in the index, including the home page. Many of these are cached, but some are not. Significant?
- many of the pages that are not in the index have a relatively low percentage of unique content. Much of the site is template based. A typical example is around 1.5K out of a 50K file is unique. The non-unique content is their own stuff - a lot of nav and some standard boilerplate that appears on many pages - but it's their own, not out of some product catalog.
- much of the unique stuff is very extensively scraped by splogs and MFA sites. Also by a few less crappy sites with PR of 3 or 4.
- They confessed today to a major site rearchitecture around the same time that rankings tanked in Yahoo! They claim that link paths and URLs did not change, though I'm a little skeptical. Still, 6 months ought to be sufficient time for things to rebalance, right?
- I'm trying to track down whether there were any pre-historic, extensive, non-relevant link exchanges. There are a few footprints in the sand, but I haven't discovered anything terrible yet. In any case, I'm fairly sure the current owners haven't done anything like this in the last 9 months, so can we rule this out as a cause for a sudden mid-May drop?
That's all I can think of for now. I'm still following up on some other basics, trying to get slurp crawl statistics, etc. Any other forensics people can suggest?
I'd appreciate any thoughts, guidance or suggestions. I'm fairly new at SEO, and jumping in with both feet on this one!
Cheers.
I have always held the belief that if one built a site worthy of ranking then it would rank. This has been far from true in Y the past few months. In my niche there are several sites that will have pages scattered all over the top 20 results - many of the sites being pretty much garbage in my estimation. No indents, but simple stand alone entries in the serps.
I do see a lot of sites that are interlinking with each other doing quite well. But, it is not a simple as the number of links from what I see.
WBF
