Will Yahoo! penalize you for too much SEO?

How much is too much?

[andrewshim]

With the recent update in Yahoo!, my site has slid from the top of page 2 to the top of page 3. Unfortunately, this one page drop has drastically hurt my traffic since my site is in its first year. Nothing I do seems to be able to move my site up.

Question : Does Yahoo! penalize you too much SEO (example - too high a keyword density). Is there a threshold that rings any spam alarm bell and signals them to drop a site?

I ask this because I've been trying out a couple of things I read about (nothing illegal or spammy - my site is clean) and wonder if this caused Yahoo! to intentionally drop my site a couple of rungs.

[abacuss]

You didnt mention whether the same thing happened with google or msn. As per my consent try to figure out whether the keyword density is too high. Apart from that check the backlinks and also at the same time analyze how many times do you update your pages.

Yahoo likes pages that keep updating themselves. may be once a month.. just try it out.

[andrewshim]

I'm nowhere in Google just yet - probably coz my site is currently only PR2 and in one of the most competitive key phrases. That's why I've been concentrating my efforts on Yahoo! while I climb up the google ladder.

After recovering from the shock of falling to page 3 and suffering a big drop in traffic and earnings, I eventually did my homework and found lots of things that I could tweak for the better. Glad to say that as of today, I'm climbing up - almost to page one. Yahoo! seems to be going thru another update and I'm quite confident now... the lesson was well and truly learnt!