Yahoo Mystery

For months, Pin Bottle ranked on the first page for Yahoo for the keyword: "Boston Website Design," yet we were nowhere to be found in Google. Suddenly, the complete opposite has taken place: First page Google, buried in Yahoo. Reading around the forums, it's safe to say that Yahoo has either updated their algorithm, applied site penalties similar to Google or both. There's just no other explanation! It's hard to get good information on Yahoo optimization simply because most people optimize for Google, and optimizing for all three search engines (Yahoo, Google and MSN) is just too ambitious. Most people just pick one and focus their efforts on the one they chose. But because Google continues to gain market share at a much larger rate than the other S.E.'s, Google is usually the top choice, and SEO's just cross their fingers for the other two and hope to rank well.

The assumption's been out there for a while that Google focuses on back-links, MSN focuses on on-page optimization, while Yahoo falls somewhere in between. But if this is true, answer me this riddle: Why does P.B. rank on the first page in Google and MSN yet is buried in Yahoo? This is why the old assumption may longer be true, and until more people figure it out and post the new info in forums, I'll be as clueless as the next guy as to how to optimize for Yahoo. But in reality, it doesn't make much of a difference, since we target Google anyway....