Yahoo problem

What to look out for

[Haecceity]

My personal [blue widgets] site used to rank in the top four or five for a one-word search on Yahoo. I didn't check for a long time and now I'm #61. On a directory search I'm #5.

My site is totally white hat, very relevant to the search term, and I'm at a loss to know what might be keeping my ranking down.

Are there any obvious things I should be looking out for?

[edited by: martinibuster at 11:00 pm (utc) on April 19, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]

[funandgames]

Remove all reciprocal links between your sites. Make all links one way. Make sure you use every one way link combination possible between your sites. I did that and not only did my Yahoo rankings come back, but are better than ever. Google and MSN improved as well.

[abacuss]

One way linking is always considered better, but before checking out for the reciprocal links just check out your backlinks. Do a analysis of your site and the competitors site to check what they have done over this period of time.

[Haecceity]

Thanks for your suggestions, guys, and apologies for the delay in thanking you. I got busy for a few days and forgot to log in and check for responses.

funandgames: Interesting point. I do have several sites with reciprocal links, but this is because they are the same site in translation to various languages. If, say, a Chinese speaker in the US is looking for info in English on [blue widgets] he or she might be pleasantly surprised to find that there's also a Chinese version.

It's a problem to know what to do about that. It's important to me to highlight the translation work that we do, since I'm in a nonprofit field. But frankly, Yahoo has never brought much traffic compared to Google, so I'll do what I htink is best for my site's visitors and not lose any sleep over whether Yahoo like that or not.

abacuss: I have 4100 links, compared to the #1 site, with 686, 5500 for #2, and 4,090 for #3. I don't check backlinks often, so I don't know if anything has changed much. The site that's #1 in Yahoo is #189 in Google! I don't know whether than means Google is bad, or Yahoo is bad. It's an okay site, but not much content, and the organization behind it has a reputation for unethical activity (cybersquatting, for example).