Yahoo Hates Me - Google Loves Me

[steveweber123]

Hello,

I have about a half dozen sites which do extremely well in Google for the keywords I have optimized for. They are in health related areas anywhere from two years to a few months old. In total they get about 70,000 visitors per month...mostly from Google but also from MSN, DogPile, and countless tiny directories.

I have first page rankings in Google for quite a number of keywords. However, my traffic from Yahoo is all but zero.

The difference here is so extreme, I just don't understand.

Does anyone have an idea where I might start in fixing this or what could be the problem. What could be going on which causes Yahoo to ignore me?

Thank you,

Steve

[bwnbwn]

steveweber123 I have great ranking in yahoo fact is geting better and have lost most of my Google listings.

Really frustrating for you and for me but if I were you I would keep everything as it is, and I need to find out how to get Google to show some love.

[Quadrille]

If you are doing well in google, it's tempting to say "don't worry" - unless your target audience is women aged 24-40ish, Yahoo! is pretty unlikely to be a key source of visitors.

The worry is that if you have recently got this problem, it may be a warning; heed it now before Google goes bad.

You don't say if it's a new problem, or always been that way.

Either way, but especially if it's recent, I'd start looking carefully at your linking patterns and content duplication - that's assuming there's nothing immediately obvious that you've been 'getting away with' - no offense intended, but SEs policies have changed, maybe you have things that are no longer liked, and have not felt the need to change them.

[steveweber123]

Thank you for your responses. No, it has always been this way. I have never done well in Yahoo for some reason.

I have one site that has moved up to numbers 2 or 3 in Google for the company name of a large MLM. It is sort of a modified blog site with lots of new content all the time. It gets about 40,000 page views per month. However, it doesn't show up in Yahoo for anyone's searches; I get zero traffic to it from Yahoo.

Also, I think it is the type of site which "yahoo type" users would use. I sure would like to get some of that traffic.

[bwnbwn]

No, it has always been this way, so I assume years for some sites. That is kinda weird as I am blessed with our major site to do well in all 3 the lowest being msn and I relly feel this is do to errors in code, but not enough to cause bot issues.

About the only thing I could say it may be due to the way yahoo indexes your site. I have read and heard were the yahoo serp will pull 2 url's for the same page. The before rewrite and after rewrite so it processes 2 url's for the same page and kicks them out.

I am not sure on how to verify this other than do a site check on your site in yahoo, google, and msn and see if one has way more pages than the other...

In one site I have Google has 1800, yahoo has 2900 an msn has 3000 I see were Google doesn't have but what my site map shows and does not index all my blog postings were the other two do.

I wonder sometimes it the site map does hurt more than help in Google...

[jimbeetle]

steveweber123, what does Y! return when you do a simple www.example.com search for each site? Also, have you checked the sites in Yahoo Site Explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com]? Are the pages indexed?

[mlxwizard]

We are in the same boat, as are many other webmasters.
I suspect if you are ranking high in Google and MSN, you are probably under a penalty in Yahoo. The trouble is in determining just what penalty the have applied and it may drive you batty trying to figure it out.
Yahoo seems to have penalized on of my main sites for too many inlinks. We never bought a single link, but they assume we did.
Guilty until proven innocent.

When your site is 7 years old (an enternity on the web), and you run a good content site, others tend to link to you. Yahoo seems to hold that against you.

My Google to Yahoo ratio is 30 to 1, so we have discarded them as a viable search engine. MSN has recently come around and we rank equally as well there as Google.

Some SE's do it right, while others fumble along.
Don't blame yourself.

[ecmedia]

Most decent websites seem to underperform in Yahoo because the Yahoo search engine is so broken. While Yahoo claims that they have a lot more share of the search market in none of the 6 websites I see that. Google almost always sends more than 80% the visitors. I have simply learned to ignore everyone except Yahoo.

[dibbern2]

I'm in the same sad boat.

Not with just one site, but about a dozen. All at least 5 years old, all ranked well in G, so-so in MSN, and stinkers in Yahoo.

I sure hope this thread grows with some worthy suggestions.

Thank you to everyone who shares an idea or two.

[beingaquatic]

I was about to ask this question: "After 1 year or so I'm doin good in Google, my traffic is G traffic and some AOL as well. But where's this YAHOO! thing everybody talks of? I've tried submitting my site but it never got listed. May be that's because I do adsense on my blog." Anyways felt a bit better to know that I'm not the alone. I'M NOT EVEN INDEXED BY YAHOO! What kinda spiders do they have?

[willybfriendly]

This thread comes up with a fair degree of regularity, and I seldom see much of help.

I have a site that has been top ten in G across hundreds of search terms for the better part of a decade.

Results in Y have stunk for 2-3 years.

A Y search for www.example.com returns virtually every page in the site.

Site explorer shows every page on the site and about 2000 inbounds to pages across the site.

I have never figured out why Yahoo gives so little love :(

I keep waiting for clear suggestions to be made in one of these threads one of these times so that I might do some alterations. Perhaps one of those old fashioned lists applying points to different ranking criteria - keyword in url, title, anchor text, etc.

[martinibuster]

Ranking well in Google does not entitle you to a trifecta (G,MSN, Y), much less a superfecta. ;) Some sites do well in Yahoo for reasons that won't work in Google and vice versa. In short, they're different algos with different ranking parameters and different levels of spam tolerance. The love and hate runs in both directions because there are some that rank well in Yahoo but stink in Google. So why, why, why should it seem extraordinary if Yahoo and Google display different SERPs?

I have never figured out why Yahoo gives so little love...

We all think our babies are beautiful, even me. I used to think one of my sites was clean as a whistle until a Googler kind of coughed about a section that happened to be my top earner. :o

[willybfriendly]

Ranking well in Google does not entitle you to a trifecta...

Granted, especially if one is trying to get their via pure SEO.

I have always been of the opinion that the easiest way to have a top site is to have a site that deserves to be there.

To have a site that ranks top ten across numerous terms in one engine, but barely makes the top 100 in another is just bewildering.

I didn't frame this issue in terms of expectations, but rather as a question as to what factors influence Y rankings. Like the rich discussions of yore in which solid, functional information was shared. But, I suppose what I am really looking for is information about factors that interfere with a site ranking in Y, since I suspect that is more to the point in my case.

[microlinx]

MB:

The question is not why can't we GET a trifecta, it's why did we HAVE a trifecta before, and now, without any substantial changes to the site, Yahoo dumps you.

I guess they just want to be different.

[martinibuster]

The question is not why can't we GET a trifecta, it's why did we HAVE a trifecta before, and now... Yahoo dumps you.

;) That's not what the OP says:

...it has always been this way. I have never done well in Yahoo for some reason.