I've noticed that when I search for my domain on yahoo, like "domain.com", that one of my secondary pages comes up as the first result. The homepage is at the bottom of the third page of search results. If I query for something specific, like text in the title of the home page, it does rank higher in the search results. Is this just Yahoo! weirdness, or am I being penalized for something about the page ( overoptimization, backlinks coming too fast, etc )
Yahoo has penalties? You know what, of my time messing with the search engines and playing the Google algorithm game I've noticed something. Yahoo's results are almost always just like Google's on any given day at any given time. What does this mean to me? Google's spidering/indexing SEO game all the top dollar experts play is a load of hot air. If you want to know what's really ranking, check Yahoo. Google's results are probably the same anyway and Yahoo changes A LOT less than they do.
I always find Yahoo and Google different. I have a site #5 on Yahoo and isn't even top 100 on Google. I don't think Yahoo is penalizing you, they would have notified your site. It's merely their algorithm.
Maybe it's the age of your site? If your site is relatively new it may take some time before you rank well for the words in your title.
Sorry but I have to laugh to the statement from gray929: I don't think Yahoo is penalizing you, they would have notified your site. Do you honestly think the search engines would be chasing down all the spammers to let them know they have been banned or penalized? Every spammer would be e-mailing them back trying to find out what they did wrong. What a nightmare. Then each of those spammers would be trying to figure out how to get around that penalty. It does sound like you might have some type of penalty. I have seen this type of thing happen repeatedly. They will suddenly give more weight to one of your internal pages instead of your homepage. It seems like they just give a penalty to the homepage, but not the internal pages. Determining what caused the problem can be tough. You can try contacting Yahoo, but they usually don't want to tell you the exact problem. They will tell you that you need to check their seo guidelines. You can try removing anything relatively spammy and try to get more links. That doesn't always solve the problem though.
So then how do you get your main page re-included in yahoo? Once you remove the problem will yahoo rank your main page again or do you have to do something to get it re-included?
For Google, to get a site reincluded you send them a personalized email. I never heard of only 1 page being penalized its probably something stupid like there was no links pointing to your index page?
Nope you have not been penalized,If your secondary page get traffic and have some special content then it is showing first for your keyword domain.com Please compare the traffic between pages.