Yahoo Sandbox?

[MarcinSarasota]

Does Yahoo have a sandbox now? I built a site in early June and am no where to be found in Yahoo. I am doing well in MSN. I remember getting into Yahoo much more quickly for my previous sites.

Any thoughts or insight?

[Salt River Media]

Yes, I believe they do. It does not seem to have the same characteristics of Google's sandbox. Instead of not appearing anywhere in the top 1000 it seems you can make it to the top 100-200 and then stall. And, I've also noticed that it only seems to apply to the heavier searched keywords.

[Falcon Living]

Hey Marc, since you and I are following a similar pattern dates and a similar SEO by SEO-Guy and link strategy, I thought you would be happy to know that I am living through the same nightmare and same pattern as far as yahoo but doing pretty good in MSN. I just wanted to let you know and I am actually relieved that I am not the only one in this nightmare. Just to give you the good news. Google seems to be positively accepting this work and I am already up in top 40 for my keywords in Chicago (very hard market to be in) (mine is an older site though as far as home page being cached with no SEO) and rising steadily. But as far as yahoo is concerned. let's cross our fingers shall we?.

[Bob Crain]

I was also in the top 10 for a long time for San Diego Real Estate. I noticed that after I joined this forum Yahoo picked up a ton of backlinks (over 3000) and my site dropped to the mid 20's, but not for all the keywords. I am wondering if the addition of all those back links is the issue?

The good news is my site has improved in Google, which gets more traffic anyway!

[webmaster]

I will be the first to admit, that what has been going on in Yahoo lately is a compelte mystery to me, but it does appear to be a filter for new sites, as my older ones with exactly the same copywriting techniques in the same linking programs are all first page

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=des...v1-&fl=0&x=wrt #1 Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=pho...v1-&fl=0&x=wrt #1 Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=orl...v1-&fl=0&x=wrt #2
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=min...v1-&fl=0&x=wrt #2 yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=den...v1-&fl=0&x=wrt #2

All of those are older sites and represent a range of competitive to semi competitive main terms "area + real estate" including Phoenix, Orlando, Minneapolis, Denver, and Destin.

Take a few newer clients
Chicago nowhere
Jackson Hole nowhere
Bradenton nowhere

So yeah it seems to be a sandbox - I am really reluctant to do to many major changes as what we apply does work in MSN, and especially Google which is our main focus, as it is the giant for real estate traffic, so I am going to wait for Yahoo to do a major update while in the meantime continue to test on my own sites as opposed to client sites so that we can do some more drastic changes and see how they affect the various engines.

[webmaster]

SD, I dont think it is this forum that is contributing thousands of links to your site, as you have a low post count, however high posting members at forums (Within the thousands) are not uncommon on many boards and often they have signatures with links to their sites and suffer no ill effect, in fact it would make no sense as their signature and posts are legitimate and contribute to useful content for the search engines.

[SanDiego]

my serps for yahoo dont seem too much different.
(which is ok with me for right now) = )

[Bob Crain]

Probably something I did in this latest update to my site. My server was also down/ or having problems about the time Yahoo did the update.

[escapeso]

Im glad I came across this post. This is exactly what I have been experiencing as well. I have had great results with msn. For google I am steadly moving forward. But yahoo has been a black hole. To date I have had one visitor from yahoo. I have noticed I have been moving up but nowhere near the first page for any good search terms. For instance for central austin realtor (not a competitive search term) I am ranked first for google and msn but for yahoo I am ranked about 132. This weekend I have been trying to clean up my site for anything I might be penalized for. Too many and repeated meta tags. Tried to clean up some pages that might have been considered doorway pages. Anyway now I hope this is just a sandbox effect and in a few months I will start seeing some yahoo results.

[webmaster]

Yeah, I really dont think it is a penalty issue, just a yahoo you suck issue

Keep working off the advice here and they will come around eventually.