Yahoo's focus towards on-page criteria

After getting a couple of recent phone calls about some sites that I had built about 6 months ago I wondered where the traffic was coming from. Come to find out it was Yahoo search results.

Although the keywords were not very competitive the results where #1-#5 every time. None of these sites have backlinks. They do not even show up in the top 100 for Google.

Also I never paid for anything, no site submission only the suggest a site link (or some other service 6 months ago). In fact 1 site I never even bothered to promote but still was #2.

I had originally built them With SEO in mind I just did not have time to promote them with backlinks.

This shows the focus Yahoo has put on on-page criteria. Any suggestions on the idea that Yahoo might use the "Authority" theory like Google?

The nice part is if SEOing for Yahoo is easier it gives you some wiggle room for making promises to clients for performance. If I can show them fast results in Yahoo and MSN it gives my time to work on optimizing for Google.

Any thoughts or more importantly...anyone find this to be untrue?

well .... frankly i do NOT see anything consistent for yahoo, except for seeing some sites you never see anywhere else.

i have a group of sites, virtually identical in terms of "on page factors" ... and relative enfvironment .... half do good half dont .....

my opinion is EITHER
1) yahoo is broke ... or
2) they are intentionally randomizing results to encourage pay per click business ... just mixing in some relevant stuff in the top 20 so it dont look to pitiful ....

From what I've seen so far, all be it early in their new SE, Yahoo does seem to lend more to on page text than Google does.

Links do seem to account for a lot less in the new Yahoo, going by the Google PR rating.

I'm finding that you can do better in Yahoo that Google with on-page factors epending on how competetive your keywords are - for the more competetive stuff you will need backlinks to get good possition.

As for Yahoo and a "authority" algo - I would say that Yahoo tends to just count the numbers of backlinks with more being better.

Yahoo started out crazy but has seemed to have settled down with results more relevent and consistent with others. They do not seem to be going deeper than the index page at this stage though at least on my sites

Mine either.

well ... when i look at the serps ... yahoo shows MORE back pages (ie .com/whatever.htm) than google does .... in the top serps

do a search for your term and compare the top 10 at google and at yahoo ... yahoo will mave more back pages than google ... so they must be going past the index pages to do that ....

but i do agree that slurp hardly ever digs into the site like the google bot ... or the newly released "RZ bot" does ....