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Definately been seeing osme movement lately - most of it good:)
Yahoo aptimised flash sounds like "military intelligence" to me. :)
I never dared to submit a 100% flash site anywhere. I think Yahoo editors will reject it. We rarely see flash sites in Yahoo and those who are listed where probably "updated" later after submission.
Don't risk the money. Build some HTML version before you submit. And let users decide what they want to pick.
my .02
Welcome to WebmasterWorld! Sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner, my computer was stolen a couple of weeks ago and it's been tough to get online.
Check this post out:
[webmasterworld.com...]
There's a lot of info here about how Yahoo ranks. Also, this thread has a couple of really good points.
Good luck!
Thanks for the information. I read through your points and in my experience of Yahoo, I would be surprised if the answer is so complex. I doubt very much Yahoo uses anything like click popularity to determine the index. I would not be surprised if their computers could not even use the information.
We have quite a few sites on Yahoo, and until January it was rediculously easy to get in the top 5 even on competitvive keywords in the travel industry. We normally went straight in, in the top 5 and would not move afterwards, indicating click popularity or any other traffic-related measure had no relevance. We also have never named the site by keywords at whois. I don't think this matters.
My personal experience is this: each keyword should appear on average 2 to 3 times in the listing: Once in the title, once in the URL and once in the category. If you have 2 keywords, 3 times each may be too much. The optimum would be 2 of one keyword and 3 of the other. The editor's site description holds no relevance. Sites with no site description often rank higher than sites with descriptions.
Also, the keywords should be as close to the front of the site title as possible. Order does not seem to matter.
As I said, this worked fine until the end of January this year, and then someone threw a spanner in the works. Now there is something else, but I can't put my finger on it. It could be something you can't see, like an editor's score, or it could be like google's Pagerank algorithm (except using backward links from within Yahoo's directory). Or it could just be that Yahoo is deliberately skewing the results somehow to force everyone to build new sites and pay for new listings. Whatever it is, it just cost us $600, because both our new sites went in on the second page! As they say, pride comes before a fall.....
Does Yahoo refresh it's listings? I don't have a good spot now and I'm hoping I didn't flush my $300 down the drain. I think maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that no other web sites are linking to me. But regardelss, I'd like to know if I still have a chance of moving up.
Thanks in advance for the help
Its been tough but a great learning experience. I wonder if its because the site was defunct for over two years. Would that make a listing harder to obtain?
It seems they took many top ranked sites (in web hosting and seo, anyway) and put them at the back of the search results. Why? Perhaps to test whether they will percolate to the top again, and in the meantime, give others a better shot at a top slot.
Then again, I have seen weirdness in Yahoo results before in these categories, as though something had broken, with a fix coming online after some time passes.
I would be very surprised if Yahoo attempts to task its 150 harried, overworked editors to the additional task of manually positioning sites in its index. That cuts into productivity. Yahoo wants money, editorial considerations are a secondary consideration, from what I see over here.
