As I look through many of the SERPS for Yahoo, I can't help buy notice they seem to love sites without templates. Sites where the complete content changes 100% from page to page to page. It seems like I can only get sites to rank in Yahoo without templates. Anyone see this also and understand what I mean?
I have many sites that rank well for highly competitive keywords on yahoo. Not sure what you mean by templates, but I build custom "templates" in dreamweaver and all pages in the site use the same template, but of course the content changes on each page.
Although it takes more time, I have sites with similar topics do just fine making it into their SERPS, including blogs, which have a 'template'.
I am not sure with Yahoo anymore... they are even starting to put paid ads mixed in with the generic results. I do have good ranking with yahoo on sites but it sure became obvious that you should submit your rss feed or text sitemap... and then be patient. Ohh how i miss the engines of the 90's I would love to hear your results on the template theory though, if you test it out.