I never do a lot of SEO specific to Yahoo. I focus on creating content, getting links, and making sure that I’ve done all of the basics, like including my keyword phrase in the title tag and stuff. But I was looking at some of the Yahoo poker search results today, and I can see why Yahoo’s search results are a laughing stock. They don’t even do the basics well. I’ll give you some examples using this site.
I have an article here at Poker SEO about “poker keyword research”. It’s located here: http://www.pokerseo.org/poker/seo/keyword-research/
Now, “poker keyword research” is not a particularly competitive phrase. There are probably only 8 or 9 pages on the Internet that are specifically targeting this phrase. (See these search results in Google.) The page I’ve written is a pretty detailed, legitimate resource. There are no affiliate ads on the page. It should be a really high quality search result for the phrase “poker keyword research”.
But take a look at Yahoo’s search results for the phrase poker keyword research. The #3 and #4 results are from a site I used to operate. The #3 result has NOTHING to do with poker keyword research in any way. It’s about tight-aggressive Texas holdem strategy. And the #4 result is about poker rooms in the UK; again, it has NOTHING to do with poker keyword research. The ONLY reason those pages might be considered relevant to the phrase is because there’s a link to a page that’s actually on-topic.
Then if you scroll down to result #9, you’ll see a page on this site about goal setting. This one’s slightly more relevant, because it’s about being a poker webmaster, not a poker player, but it’s still far less relevant than the actual page on the subject I have on this site.
Now, I also have a page about “poker link building” on this site. It’s here: http://www.pokerseo.org/poker/seo/link-building/. When I search for “poker link building” in Yahoo, that page comes up #2 in the results. That’s not a bad search result at all. So this weird behavior from Yahoo in its poker search results isn’t always screwed up. It’s just sometimes screwed up.
But I don’t know how I could have made it any easier for Yahoo to pick the right page to rank for in the “poker keyword research” search.
Now as far as Yahoo’s more broad search results go. They seem to be okay, but they seem to have the same heavy prejudice toward including the Wikipedia in there results that Google does. I don’t like having Wikipedia as the #1 or #2 result for every query I search for. It doesn’t serve me well as a surfer; I already KNOW that the Wikipedia has a page on the subject, and if that’s the page I want to read, then I’ll search for it on the Wikipedia. But a search for “poker” by itself brings up the Wikipedia poker page as #1 and the Wikipedia Texas holdem page as #9. Other than that, most of the results are pretty good and diverse – some poker rooms, some poker portals, etc.
A search for “poker games” in Yahoo is a little less satisfying. I was hoping to find at least one page in the top 10 results which included a list of poker games you can play, but no, there were just playable games and poker sites listed. And the Wikipedia results again.
A search for “poker strategy” in Yahoo was pretty good. I was particularly pleased to see Beat The Fish’s poker strategy page in the results.
One thing I did notice about all of these searches is that none of the results seemed “spammy” to me. I took a quick look at these same poker related search results in Google too, and again, in the top ten results, I didn’t see anything that looked particularly spammy. The best results for the phrase “poker games” that I found were in the Ask.com search engine, but I guess most searchers don’t use Ask for anything. In fact, even in MSN, I didn’t see a lot of spammy results for any of these searches. Maybe the spammers are focusing more on longtail phrases lately.