Over the last several weeks, I've seen a site that's been rock solid #1 or #2 result for a keyword search for several years slip to the #8 or #9 position. Disturbingly, the sites that are now above me, all are pretty insignificant players and some are fairly newcomers to our industry.

I'm wondering if perhaps, Yahoo! is weighting sites that pay to be included annually heavier than those that are grandfathered in to their directory and don't pay an annual fee.

Any thoughts, experiences, or insights? Please share!

I haven't been around here for awhile so...Happy Holidays to my ole friends!

There are many, many possibilities; it would be unwise to guess!

Yahoo! doesn't care if they are significant payers or not; the algo is blind to such things, and if you have more competitors, that alone may be the problem.

Are all those sites paying sites?

How is the site doing in the other SEs?

Has anything changed on the site in the past few months?

Have any recent Yahoo! changes possibly been responsible?

Is the site as frequently updated now as it always was?

Look at those questions and more; keep digging until a positive 'clue' emerges.

Look more closely at the opposition; have they actually moved forward? Has the niche in general changed?

Sadly, being 'rock solid' is increasingly a rarity these days, change is now the natural order, even for Yahoo!

Broadly the three key questions are:

1. Am I doing something wrong (maybe something that used to be right)?

2. Are they doing something right?

3. Has Yahoo! changed the rules, and if so, in what way?

Thanks for your reply!

The reason for my post is that a few of the sites above my site in question should not be there normally because from what I know about search engines, they aren't attractive (poor content, etc.). They are sites that the other major search engines have passed over yet Yahoo has them positioned above some well optimized content rich sites (other than my own). That's why I was wondering if perhaps there was an unknown variable at work that was artificially inflating or weighting their performance in Yahoo. It's just a mad guess. Anyone with similar experiences? Any ideas?

Surely some people must have theories! Please share them. Thamks.

I find that the quality of Yahoo's search results is terrible. Spam filled and old, out of date websites, old caches, its awful.