Yahoo listings that make no sense

[Bubba]

I have many first page listing in Yahoo for some very difficult keywords, but I just ran across something that has me stumped. I searched for the single keyword "diamonds" in Yahoo and the results look more like a spider engine than Yahoo results. #1 is [wam.umd.edu...]
#2 is [geocities.com...]

#1 has no keywords in the desc. or the domain.

Is this a great opportunity or am I missing something?

[tedster]

Some thoughts: #1 does have the keyword in the Title and in <h1> tags. Also, the page is EXTREMELY basic, with no navigation, layout tables, javascript, etc to distract an algorithm. Plus lots of on-topic content, keyword repetition in the body. I can see how it might rank well in Yahoo. A few years back they were kind of prejuduced against commercial sites anyway. Also, I'd bet this page (a chestnut from 1995) has seen lots of sticky clicks in six years.

Interesting to see that Neil Diamond places number 11 in such a commercial category. A while back I almost lost it trying to find the website for the rock band "Live".

[Bubba]

Why would the simplicity of the site matter? Or keyword repetition? Yahoo is not crawling the site, are they?

[tedster]

Yeah, you're probably right about the keyword reps not mattering. I wasn't really thinking there.

But Yahoo has introduced a new ranking algo for their Directory, which I don't quite grok well right now. When they first took in Google, there was some report that they might fold the Google data into their ranking order for Directory sites as well as their Web Pages results. I don't think they're doing that exactly, but they do seem to be including some new factors in the ranking.

However, my money would be on click tracking, and this site would have a long history of happy clicks.

[Bubba]

Click tracking... interesting that you bring that up. I am running a click through experiment here, not to get into details, but it is very, very complex. It is increasing the click thru's by 15%. We have been running this for 60 days and have seen no increase.

Just FYI

[seth_wilde]

These listings don't look odd to me. Even though #1 doesn't have the keyword in the description or url it does have it in the title and category.