Yahoo Rankings Have Not Budged...for Years

[Lingerboy]

My site in #1 in MSN and #2 in Google for a very competitive keyword. My site domain is the keyword, and we are a well established and very popular commerce site. The problem I have is with Yahoo. My site is #8 for the same keyword. This ranking has stayed the same for a few years...even through the changes from Yahoogle to Yahoo. I have a directory listing, which is grandfathered from before they charged the $300 annual fee, so my description (which is highly targeted to the keyword in question) is not easily modified via meta tags. The rankings for this keyword seem to be etched in stone...they never budge.

Can anyone provide any advice? I know every prisoner thinks they are innocent, but in this case, this site really should be #1.

[StupidScript]

Count yourself lucky you are in the SERPS at all on Yahoo. Not much solace, I know, but we used to have thousands of pages and many domains in good positions ... all gone since Jan.1 with no idea what it will take to get them back in and no help even from our personal rep at Yahoo.

Frankly, it's a bit of a miracle that your position has stayed where it is considering all of the changes that have been taking place.

[steveb]

If all seven results above you are in the Directory, then your term may be one of those hand sorted by Yahoo. (If it is an obscure term then this is unlikely.)

[sdsugrad]

Stupid Script,
I'm with you on this one. I was either #1 or #2 for our main search term on yahoo for the past 5 years or so. We specialize in a certain product that only a couple of other internet sites sell. At the beginning of the year, yahoo dropped us like a hot potato. We were teased about a month ago when we came back to a top 20 spot. Now once again nothing. We use Miva as our shopping cart and it looks like those pages were dropped. This has been really strange as many of the sites in the top 10 are not worthy of such a ranking. A couple of them even refer to vendio stores that are no longer in use. Was considering the $300 submit, but am hesitant to possibly just throw $300 away. Anyway, if anyone is in a similar boat and finds out what the problem is, pass on any tips.
Thanks

[walkman]

"Was considering the $300 submit, but am hesitant to possibly just throw $300 away"

worthless. I am in for free, can't remember when was last time I got a hit from it.

[sdsugrad]

I was in for free as well. Now that I've lost about 30K hits a month from Yahoo, just wondering how much it has cost me.

[24bit]

My Yahoo results were pretty much the same for 3 years. However, in the last 6 months my Yahoo results are now suddenly 50% more than Google, and my Google's numbers haven't changed. I can't believe how much I'm getting in Yahoo without paying a dime (I don't pay $299). And some of my very competitive keywords are exceptionally high in Yahoo, such as one being as high as #4.
I'm only getting about 1,000 searches a day on my site total, but I do consistently get about 4,100 unique visitors per day.

I have no idea why my Yahoo results have jumped and stayed that way. But I'm not complaining. :)

[nuevojefe]

You *might* see some change if you acquire another Y! directory listing. More likely though you're stuck waiting for Y! mechanics to hand tune-up your SERPs some day.