Great Google positions, TERRIBLE Yahoo rankings. Why?

[TheSkepticGuy]

I operate a very large discussion board in which several tactics have been employed that result in exceptional Google search results... we get over 600,000 unique IP's per month on well-over 6,000 unique search terms... and we're in the top-ten position on most searches specific to our topics.

But Yahoo is a very different story... we get less than 20,000 uniques... we get nearly three times that from Ask.com. Our site maps have been accepted by Yahoo's site explorer. Yahoo reports over 800,000 pages indexed. But search return positions are terrible... where we're positioned between 1-3 on Google, we might be 50-60 on Yahoo.

What are the key things we should be looking for in a situation like this?

Thanks.

[potentialgeek]

We could solve the entire problem by reverting to the situation only a few years ago when Yahoo search was "powered by Google." :/ (Had same results as Google, for those who weren't online then.)

Yahoo now seems to be powered by teenagers posing as PhDs. How many more years do they need to get their act together as a business and as an engine?

p/g

[lohia anirudh]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/yahoo_search/3347054.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 10:31 pm on May 22, 2007 (utc -8)

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Hi,

In Google my site is ranking in top 15 for last 1 year but its nowhere in Yahoo and MSN (top 100), Do you guys have any idea what could be the possible reason. Or do I need to do something special to get the rankings?

Regards,
Anirudh

[supafresh]

I track hundreds of keywords on my site and with Google and MSN we show consitantly on the first page.

Our yahoo rankings goes as follows.

4 word key phrase - Top 10 yahoo.
3 word Key pharse - Top 20 yahoo
2 word key phrase - top 20-30 yahoo.

Keep in mind that all my ducks are in a row with on page and off page optimization. I have 2 listings in the yahoo directory. I have removed all duplicate content through site exporer and have over a million backlinks and 600,000 pages indexed.

Only thing i can think of is to pay yahoo and see what happens then.

[stajer]

I would venture that Yahoo deliberatly attempts to get search results that are significantly different than Google's. You can never beat a competitor by playing catchup - by trying to launch a product substantially similar - you need to differentiate yourself in some non-trivial manner so all or part of the audience will begin to see your product as superior. If you are a G user and decide to give Y search a try but find Y serp's the same as G, why bother switching?

[arikgub]

But, it appears that the learned engineers at Y have determined the above to be a sign of over-optimization and therefore penalize the page/site.

willybfriendly, thanks for the insight!

I am running a website that dominates Google and MSN serps (#1 to #3) for all high volume keywords related to the website niche. Yet I am not even in the first 100 in Yahoo

After I read you post and realized that I have <title>=<h1> on all of my pages, I checked the pages that do appear on the first page of Y serps for one of the keywords of interest.
Out of 8 pages having the "keyword" in the <title>, 1 had a completely unrelated <h1> and 7 others didn't have a <h1> tag at all!

If that's indeed the reason for the penalty, it is so dumb of Y. I believe my website is an "authority" in its niche, yet many dozens of spam and junk sites rank higher just because their webmasters were too ignorant/lazy to build the correct page structure and put a <h1> tag

Not sure I gonna ruin my pages just to please Yahoo though ...

TheSkepticGuy,

Do you have <title>=<h1> everywhere? How about your "competition" ranked #1-#10 in Yahoo?

[TheSkepticGuy]

Yes, we have tight legacy code as each page has a descriptive
<title> - site - content headline - subforum
<h1> content headline
<h2> headlines of follow-up content
<h3> subheads in content
and so on.