I have had over a dozen sites. When I first make the site and optimize it on page I typically rank one or two for my main search terms on yahoo and around the bottom of the first page on google. Once I start link building with my targeted keywords I start to move up google and down yahoo. I don't really get why that happens. Second, how do you adjust your description that shows up on yahoo? Sometimes it pulls the meta description, sometimes it pulls something off the page. I am not sure. Thanks,
I'm not sure why you would be moving down in rankings unless you were doing something unnatural with your link building...ie. not varying link anchor text, building too many links up all at once, anything spammy, etc. You could even be getting penalized by Yahoo after your site has been up a while. Try to clean up your sites as much as possible and focus on building lots of quality links with good link anchor text. Yahoo likes a high quantity of links with your keywords in the link anchor text. How new are your sites? What are some of the urls?
I have not done anything spammy. My main sites are koleabeachvillas.com, haliikaioceanfrontrentals.com, and waikoloavacationrentals.com. The one I have put the most time into is koleabeachvillas.com and the main search term is kolea. Three of the sites above me I think have a 0 or 1 page rank. For waikoloavacationrentals.com, My main search term is waikoloa rentals and a site I have vistawaikoloarentals.com comes up higher than it and it has a 0 page rank and no optimization. Thanks
But there's is nothing to worry about if you are doing good for Google. I would be happy if Google doesn't affect rankings and increasing it day by day...
The search engines decide what to show in the search results. The meta description is just a suggestion on what to display.
Perhaps Yahoo doesn't like that you cross link those websites so heavily. That isn't really white hat seo. That is more of an attempt to use those links to affect search engine rankings. I have had websites penalized in Yahoo before likely for that very reason.
I honestly wouldn't worry about yahoo. they're not a big part of the market right now and they're only getting smaller.
I would hope that would not penalize you for that since it was done specifically for the user and not the search engines. I have no followed a lot of the links so it was not as much.