ok, as I have slowly fallen in Yahoo I have been checking the sites that are replacing me. For the terms 'vacation rental' and 'vacation rentals' vacation-rental-listings .net ranks in the top 5. These terms are very competitive, so i looked into how this site achieved it. The terms are mentioned a small handful of times on the page, (couldn't see and hidden text so no blackhat methods) and in the meta tags NOT however in the title. Links wise, it only has ~1000 backlinks in Y!. Of these links very few are related, and those that are don't seem like the most authoritive of sites. The only other noticeable thing is that it has the term in its domian name. Oh, and the domain was registered mid 2004. I'm a bit baffled to be honest, im kinda hoping the Y! algo is in a bit of a mess at the moment and will sort itself out. Am I missing something with this site, i just can't seehow it can rank that highly! Any input appreciated.
Yahoo seems to give lots of weight to having the keywords in the URL and if you have the keywords in the URL then most of your inbound links will probably have the keywords too. That seems to be a big factor in ranking in Yahoo. Having very few keywords in the content goes with my theory that Yahoo has a filter for sites that keyword stuff the content and keeping the density very low will avoid that filter.
yeah, good thinking - it never clicked that if keywords are in the url then every link is likely to have those keywords even if just the url is displayed.
Its 'not' just about that, it should also be about quality sites linking to you, the more the better. There are many sites below this one with hundresds if not thousands of links from better quality sites, all with anchor text matching, in some variation, the search query.
hmm old news a bout links , the sights with most weight seem to be org or .gov, hence weight given to information and authorative sites. So links are not the primary strategy. Yes good content, but not content alone.
Still doesn't come close to explaining why the site i mentioned in my initial post ranks where it does. Also, just noticed there are 3/4 sites in their network of sites that all have the same content, google has noticed it and flagged all the pages as supplementals. I honestly can't believe this site ranks where it does. Stupid search engine!
Yahoo (with this update anyways) doesn't seem to be paying attention to quality of links. I have a site that I use to test with and have a couple thousand links which are not even related content links and the site has first page rankings for pretty much every key phrase I want. All from having various inbound link text (not the same every link).