Yahoo! from my perspective

Yahoo! from My Perspective
December 23, 2008

Search engines are funny things. Not funny as in "ha ha" - funny as in "weird'. After topping the results for almost two years in Yahoo, my most popular website has now fallen to the third page for both search terms. Which begs the question "Why?"

I made some minor changes to the site several months ago, attempting to add additional (new) keywords to the text. This worked well in Google as the site moved up in the results for the new search term while reamining high for the other terms.

I soon realized this search term wasn't bringing in the extra business I'd hoped for and my site also began moving down for its popular search terms in Yahoo. I tweaked the text to better reflect the old keyword density and again stayed high in Google's results but have still been dropping in Yahoo even though the site should be back to "normal."

Then suddenly, I noticed I was back in my rightful place in Yahoo but, strangely, this only lasted one day. Now I'm on the third page again. The changes I made may have been the reason, so perhaps I should just be patient and give things time to normalize.

This leads me to two conclusions (at least in my case):

1. While it takes a new site much longer to rise up the results in Google, once you reach the site's highest postion, it tends to be fairly stable.

2. A new website can rise up the results ladder much more quickly in Yahoo, but it's positioning can drop more quickly as well.

3. Onpage optimization has a more dramatic effect with Yahoo than Google.

Having said all this, I'm sure there are those who would disagree because they've seen the opposite effect with their own websites. That's the thing about search engines - the one thing that's really predictable is their unpredictability.