My site gets good rankings in MSN and Google, but Yahoo dropped my top 10 rankings in the last update. Since Yahoo seems to be motivated by money, I am thinking of submitting a review request but I am wondering what you guys think Yahoo would respond if I stated something along the following: I have been a big advertiser with you through Overture (spending close to 10K a month), but I have had to cut my budget by 50% due to the lost natural search rankings which helped to increase my ROI. Hubert
Instead of going with your plan of action, it would be good to review your site for any possible reasons behind the drop in the ranking and look for ways to rectify them. What you plan to do is an outright accusation that might be totally baseless. Better renovate your site with few innovations that can drive its ranking. romi
Will take it under consideration, but I have had severval people review the site already and no one has been able to find any reason for the loss in rankings. It is really not my intention to accuse them of anything, but want to make them aware of what has happened to one of their advertisers. The other strange thing is that I paid for the Y! Directory and within a week after I was approved for the listing, my site disappeared. That was 8 months ago. Makes me believe that the site has to be ok since Y! approved the listing.
I just got dumped from yahoo for those 2 huge terms I got ranked for 2 updates ago. I guess Yahoo either doesn't like inbound links or the co-op that I removed was actually helping me to rank.
I have never done the co-op because I hear so many mixed views on it. This is what gets me, I went out of Yahoo last April, tinkered with things and had some links removed from other sites of mine. Then emailed them for a review in November. Within 2 weeks my top 10 ranking were back but with my site title (not the title the Y! Directory uses). That lasted through about January 12th then the Y! Directory title came back in the listing and my rankings vanished again.
I don't know what has happened to Yahoo over the past few weeks. After the update, they seem to be giving priority to spammy, related (but not relevant) sites. Try searching for 'London Escort Agency' for example. #1 Closed for more than a year; #2 Hardly SEO-friendly; #3 VERY bad website; #4 Directory entry #5 The first relevant result; #6 Relevant; #7 Should be number #1; #8 As per #2; #9 The same result is in #1! #10 Relevant. Come on Yahoo, start giving us relevant Search results...
This is exactly why most people use google. We can only hope Y will either sort out its algorithm or everybody will stop using them.
Yahoo is so volatile that I am starting to get fed up with it. If you look at the posts in this Yahoo section most webmasters are asking the same question. Am I banned? Why do I lose my rank suddenly? Why is my page is nowhere to be seen? Is Yahoo nuts? etc .. I am bloody annoyed with Yahoo right now. It's like they're just shuffling sites like a deck of card.
I've done some research on Yahoo regarding search terms for my web site -- terms that rank #1 on Google. For most of these terms, I'm not even on the first page of Yahoo. It's difficult to determine what Yahoo is doing to rank sites but here are some of the observations regarding my particular search terms: 1. It likes the search term to be in the HTML page title. It gives preference to titles where the search term IS the entire title. 2. It likes the search term to be the site's domain name, or at least a page name. 3. It likes very short and spammy pages that have very little content, with the search phrase only used a few times (my best ranked Yahoo page contains only a Flash file and a couple of sentences of text). 4. It does not seem to give relevance to site popularity or age of site. There's no way that some of the pages it ranks highly could be popular because they are essentially without content or relevance. 5. Many of the sites that are highly ranked are non-U.S. sites for search terms that are primarily of interest to U.S. visitors. I suppose the only reason I even care about Yahoo is that there are still many people out there use it and who haven't discovered that Google is the better tool.