Yahoo Ranking - I am Being Beat by Sites with Zero SEO

What am I doing wrong?

[wfernley]

Hello,

I have a few questions regarding Yahoo. I'm not a Yahoo expert so I'm not very familiar with their algorythm. My Yahoo rankings suck and I would like to increase them. I'm finding for my targeted keywords that I am being beat by websites that have no SEO optimization, no BL's and very little saturation. I was curious what am I doing wrong? I am trying to build quality content, quality BL's and keyword optimization. Does Yahoo have some other optimization techniques I am not employing? These other sites that are beating mine have barely any ranking in MSN and Google. That is why I find it strange that in Yahoo they have a high ranking.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Wes

[followgreg]

Yahoo is unable to build a relevant algorithm - When their SERP is clean it is only when someone on their staff manually re-ordered results.
Sorry I can not help much, yahoo is not good what do you want:)

[martinibuster]

Have you checked if these sites are cloaking?

[Jane_Doe]

I'm finding for my targeted keywords that I am being beat by websites that have no SEO optimization, no BL's and very little saturation.

Google isn't the only search engine that doesn't cotton to SEOs trying to manipulate their results. :)

[wfernley]

Thank you for your replies!

How can I check if these websites are cloaking?

[econman]

We have some sites (all 6 to 18 months old) that get a small but steady trickle of traffic from Yahoo, and they rank about as well in Yahoo as in MSN (and higher than in Google). What's odd is that we have some other sites (similar age, similar concept, different content) that get zero traffic from Yahoo, and don't appear in the SERPs for any relevant keywords including the site names.

The oldest/strongest site with this problem takes positions #1 and #2 in both MSN and in Google for its complete/exact site name (two competitive keywords with a hyphen between them), but it doesn't appear anywhere in the top 100 on Yahoo. And, believe me, after the first 30 or so results many of the sites Yahoo is displaying are either relatively poor matches with these two keywords, or they are pretty spammy looking.

Pretty much the only way I can get Yahoo to display this site is to force it by searching for the complete/exact site name including the TLD (.com or whatever), in which case it appears in the #1 position out of 349 results (the other results are pages that cite or link to our site).

This particular site used to appear in Yahoo's SERPs a little higher than in MSN's, but then it slowly declined until it completely disappeared.

I haven't a clue why, and haven't had time to try to figure it out. My best guess is that this is due to multiple factors -- perhaps something we are doing wrong and something broken in Yahoo. But, what's odd is that its hard to think of anything we are doing differently on the two groups of sites -- the ones that get a normal flow of traffic from yahoo and the ones that get zero.

I'd be curious to know if anyone else has had a similar experience and eventually figured out what was going wrong.

[cabowabo]

How can I check if these websites are cloaking?

If you know what you are doing, you can emulate a search engine spider, usually Ink, as it is an easy one to do, and if the page you are fed is different than the one that you see in your browser - bingo, it is a cloaked page.

Most webmasters don't use good cloaking software and you can easily spoof it.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[martinibuster]

You can use Firefox to emulate Googlebot or Slurp. Be sure to turn off all scripting, too. Though if they're cloaking by IP instead of user agent, then that may not work. If someone's sloppy, then they may not have disabled caching, in which case you can see the difference between what's served to the spiders and users.