Top Ranking Scam? No Other Way

[braap]

This site must be doing some dirty and unethical to get the rankings it has.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=apartment+loans&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

The company in question ranks number 1 and 2 for the keyword in the query above. The domain in the top position, from what I can tell, was registered 1 month ago, has not been indexed by Google, has no backlinks that I can see, doesn't even have the keyword in the title...etc. Yet, it ranks number 1 in Yahoo for a semi-competitive keyword.

The domain in 2nd position has, for all intents and purposes, has been penalized by Google for link farm, spam...etc. Want me to explain why I will, just ask, don't want this post to be longer than it is.

My question, or observation, how can a company rank 1 and 2 for a semi-competitive keyword when their seo is lacking, title element missing keyword, no links, newly registered domian, etc.?

And if my observations are true, how can Yahoo not spot this?

[Cygnus]

Yahoo is completely messed up on all the loan phrases I track; I wouldn't try to match the spaminess of it though, because I have a feeling the results will be completely different 2 weeks from now.

[dcristo]

Trying to make sense of Yahoo SERPs will make u MAD!

[Darkhodge]

Gawd what is going on with that?! You're right... It was registered on the 12th March 06 and has a link popularity of 2 (on MSN and none on others)!!!

Weird... :eek:

[JEET]

I have seen some similar results for some other keywords. One of my website's has much higher link count and still is nowhere to be found in yahoo while the number 1 site doesn't have even proper english in even TITLE, forget the page itself.
It is filled with adsense though...
regards
jeet

[ArcticPro]

It's easy to get on top of Yahoo's SERPs, IMO.

[Cygnus]

I had a couple of WH sites that were doing well in Yahoo and are now toast; the BH sites I have for different phrases are thriving there, so clearly the search quality moved in the wrong direction since Mar 24th.

The results are so wonky though that I'd have a hard time believing they won't be changing...7 of the top 10 for one of the phrases I track only have blog comment spam as backlinks, so I think the algo shifted to ridiculously large main domains (those with either a ton of pages or a ton of sub-domains) and moved towards blog backlinks. I'd launch several sites that do exactly this, but I still feel it will be a temporary thing.

Another crazy thing I see is that the indexing is off its rocker -- some domains use smartermail on something like mail.domain.com where "mail." is never linked to nor is crawl accessible...but somehow Yahoo tried to index it on one of my domains. Stupid.

[braap]

Thanks for the follow up comments. I have done a bit more research since my original post and believe there may be a 302 hijacking from another site. The domain in question was penalized in Google for link farming and, from an insider, 302 redirect.

My main purpose for the post was to try and determine how this is not being caught by Yahoo and: Inform readers, protect my own sites, and send a polite email to Yahoo.

Thanks

[rehash]

yahoo is not even crawling some of my new sites...while others get right on top...and they have the same backlinks