I've been reading lately about Yahoo changing up and down their system and it's been radically changing almost on a daily basis, as in some people's sites that were never high were placing top 10, and others just the opposite, they would get buried. I only mention this to see if others have noticed how it affected their sites.

Personally, about 3 months ago, our website dropped off the face of Yahoo. We thought it only a freak accident, but after this shakeup, we're still not even placing when a direct search is done for our site. Perhaps anyone else could share similar experiences? The only reason I find it odd is because we place decently well on Google for our targeted keyword "coos bay oregon real estate" Usually within the top 5. We do however have the paid Overture going on, so for Yahoo we do technically show up at the top for Sponsored Results, but that's it.

First, I have to tell you that I have not been following Yahoo at all but I am assuming that the same thing is going on that has been going on for years with the Inktomi engine - which became Yahoo Search.

Inktomi conveniently developed a problem years ago - sites would mysteriously dissappear from their index on a regular basis. Their answer to that was to invent paid inclusion - a protection racket really - where you pay them to ensure your site stays in the index.

Yahoo bought all that and as far as I know the same thing is still happening. I check my sites and one day they are on top and next time I check they are gone from the index. A month later they are back on top.

Years ago I payed for inclusion to stop this but it resulted in lower rankings - the sites would stay in but rank lower. So, I stopped and my sites all rank well (when they are in the index).

Actually, things were stable for quite some time until recently so I did not worry about it. I assume Yahoo is just trying to coax more people to use their paid inclusion product so they started making things unstable again. I don't know if paying for inclusion still results in lower ranking but I for one am not going to waste the money to find out

Thanks for the advice, I have noticed this trend and sort of thought it might be possible, but I didn't know it had actually happened in the past, much less with the same company..well sort of. It's interesting because the first thought the Broker, webmaster and I had was to just go with the Overture sitematch and call it good. Perhaps we will re-evaluate that after monitoring it for a few months and comparing the stats they turn up.

I Haven't noticed any problems with rankings on yahoo for our company or client sites with one exception of our site disappearing for 1 day about a month ago We've got #1, 7 & 8 out of 4,400,000 for "real estate websites"...# 3 for real estate website design and many more terms we target. Most of our client sites are on the first page for everything targeted. The yahoo spider is extremely active on our sites and I suspect that continuous updates, fresh content and relevant link building helps quite a bit. I'm very curious to hear from anyone else that has seen a recent drastic change for the worse on yahoo as well as what if any changes they made to their site recently.

Mine has been steady since I got the site up.

If you have relevant content, and aren't trying to cheat the system you can usually rank pretty decently. Just never, ever try to cheat the system, that is where you end up shooting yourself in the foot.

-J

I rank fairly high on Yahoo. Took a bit of time but I worked it out. Noticed a competitor seemed to come out of nowhere and started ranking very close to me. I couldn't figure out how he was doing it as his pages did not have the relevant content for keyword search. I had noticed that he had started reciprocal linking with everyone I had on my list, but his site still didn't have the content keywords needed to rise. Then I highlighted some "white space" at the bottom of his page and noted tons of keywords hidden in his page.
This is helping him rise rapidly, however I read that the crawlers will figure out that he's cheating the system and he will be screwed.
Don't try to cheat the system. It will eventually figure out what your are doing and penalize you dearly.

Exactly, black hat SEO is not worth doing. Not when white hat methods work so well!

The key that was mentioned was *relevant* link building and there are lots of great RE sites willing to exchange links with you.

Good luck and don't freak if Yahoo has a 'burp' now and then. I've had listings drop 70 points one day and be back up the next day. I just learnt to take a deep breath and move on to something else for the day.

Good luck!

What I know about SEO could be written on a pin head. I just followed up on what other people told me and from what I read on forums like this. I was thrilled when my site eventually came out of the sandbox and had a Google pr of 4.

Anyway at the beginning of this year I began to get a ton of clients coming through my website asking about investment property. Now I only have a couple of pages on my site dealing with investments, and they are only really for information. I was curious to know why all of a sudden so many people were contacting me. Well it turns out that for one of my keyword phrases I show up second for that particular KW phrase on Yahoo. Go figure!