Went from page 3 Yahoo to no placement?

[Brian Mc]

Greetings, my new site recently ranked on page 3 of Yahoo (#25 result) for my keyword right out of the gate. That is where it started, then I dropped to page 5/6 and now I am not even ranked at all on Yahoo?

I am wondering if it is a dup content penalty, I am using a CNAME alias for my short URL to get that domain name onto my Prude template site which already has a default "username/prude/" domain name? Is this the problem?

[arenetwork]

Welcome to the Yahoo "See Saw".

Don't worry about it .... you have just been Yahoo'ed.

[webmaster]

Brian can you post the short domain and the redirect URL's ?

[Brian Mc]

Sure, thanks for the help Morgan! I am still working on the site and I am sure the code is none too clean, but the short URL is www. maryannmc.com , the long is www. maryannmcreynolds/prudentialgeorgia.com. (I still have to make a redirect on the non-www portion due to using CNAME.)

The way Prude GA does it with the template sites is that everyone gets their site under their full name, and Prude GA is encouraging all of their agents to register as many domain names as possible and host them on the Prude nameserver. (?)

To be able to keep my email on the shortname working I had to use the CNAME. I tried to research the SEO implications of this but found little to go on, researching on DNS I found that the CNAME tells the servers that the shortname is simply an alias for the real site and that there is really only one site, I thought this would mean I am OK as far as looking like a mirror site?

Any insight is appreciated, I saw previous posts where Yahoo results jumped around wildly, but never saw anyone talking about going from being ranked to NO PLACEMENT AT ALL?

[Brian Mc]

OK, the tool I was using to check placement- marketleap.com, showed me as 'no placement'. After I got done freaking out I read a little further and found that they define 'no placement' as not showing up on page 3 or better. I am still there on page 4 at #39. Whew.

Any thoughts on the CNAME alias effect on SEO is still much appreciated. (Plus anything else you can think of after looking at my site.) Thanks!