My phone is ringing off the hook again. They changed the way Yahoo.com search works.
They did it last year about this time. It's nothing really unexpected based upon tests we've been seeing Yahoo run for the past 6 weeks or so, but several marketing paradigms just shifted. Seems to happen about every 6 months or so these days.
Yahoo search results are now pretty much the same as GOOGLE, which means GOOGLE is 3x as important as it was about a year ago.
What do I do? You still need good content (articles, long descriptions, lots of info) on your website, great title tags (ask me!), and links from popular, reputable web sites. And NO spamming!
In other words, it'll be harder to be #1 for "exact keyword phrase", but much, much easier to be well ranked on Yahoo! for hundreds if not thousands of medium and small count keyword phrases. One of my sites had something like 50,000 unique words & phrases used to find the site when I did a keyword sample for a quarter of so last year.
Yahoo directory listings are now LINK POPULARITY generators instead of traffic generators. Since Y! makes SOOOO much more money off of OVERTURE PPC sponsored results than they do with their $299 a year listing fee, and since most people treat Yahoo as a search engine rather than a directory, why not use the best search engine technology around? Enter Google...
Yahoo! becomes a much, much better search tool, so that's good for the longevity of Y!
The change may help you, or hurt you, or even a little of both, but likes always, it's adapt or die!
-- Rob