Yahoo! penalty?

Hi everyone,

I believe that Phoenix was the first on this board to give tips for optimizing for Yahoo!, based on personal observations. One of the tips was to include keywords in the URL. At the time, just on a few random searches, that seemed like a good thing to try to optimize for their new engine.

With a new (do I call it an "update?") Yahoo! update, it seems like there are now relatively few pages with the exact keyword phrase in the URL. This is just an observation, and not a tried and true fact.

Just wondered if this was perhaps a new "penalty" of Yahoo's, as many SEOs do name their URLs in an attempt to raise rank? The best anectdotal evidence I have for it is that a competitor of mine is ranked high for all his keyterms in Google, yet now nowhere to be found on Yahoo! and he ONLY uses keyterms in the URL to name pages. He was high in the Yahoo! SERPs when their new engine rolled out but now is literally off the map.

Obviously it could be other variables, but just a quick look at Yahoo! results seems to at least point in this direction.

Thoughts, comments?

-Jeff

IMHO I can't see Yahoo inforcing penalties just for having keywords in the URL's of pages because if that was true then about 50% of the sites in their index would suddenly dissapear and from what I've seen of them so far they allow far worse spamming practices to go unpunished.

There has been a few threads around the webmaster boards of late regarding "clean" sites suddenly taking a dive from Yahoo for no apparent reason so who knows what their game plan is.

jeff,

I think Yahoo isn't penalizing sites for keywords in the domain, unless its a manual penalty for a spam site.The Yahoo algo is changing, so it could also be part of that. They are slowly making the rounds with regards to spam. But I still see lots of serps that return pretty darn irrelevent junk, mostly with keyword rich domains. I like working more with the linking for Yahoo, then its actual optimization which similarly like a Lite version of Google. Also, do you have any examples of some of the keywords that were effected? Particular sites?

:smile:

Phoenix

i can tell you that yahoo is banning sites for mirrow content lately i have seen several dissappear since they came on .... dont know exactly what else they are doing ... but i reported a cloaker and they did nothing about it ... so it is ok to cloak but dont use a mirrow site .... go figure that one ....