Yahoo's focus towards on-page criteria

[posterreal]

After getting a couple of recent phone calls about some sites that I had built about 6 months ago I wondered where the traffic was coming from. Come to find out it was Yahoo search results.

Although the keywords were not very competitive the results where #1-#5 every time. None of these sites have backlinks. They do not even show up in the top 100 for Google.

Also I never paid for anything, no site submission only the suggest a site link (or some other service 6 months ago). In fact 1 site I never even bothered to promote but still was #2.

I had originally built them With SEO in mind I just did not have time to promote them with backlinks.

This shows the focus Yahoo has put on on-page criteria. Any suggestions on the idea that Yahoo might use the "Authority" theory like Google?

The nice part is if SEOing for Yahoo is easier it gives you some wiggle room for making promises to clients for performance. If I can show them fast results in Yahoo and MSN it gives my time to work on optimizing for Google.

Any thoughts or more importantly...anyone find this to be untrue?

[Dani]

I get an amazing amount of traffic from Google, but have yet to figure Yahoo! out. I know that they put a lot of emphasis onto on-page stuff, but it seems to be different than even what Google focuses on on-page (ie google loves H1 tags, and they don't help with yahoo).

I wonder if Yahoo likes super light code??

[mrandrei]

I've read somewhere that Yahoo gives more weight in content and doesn't give a huge value in backlinks.

[Dani]

Right ... but the trick is figuring out just what content it is that Yahoo likes. i.e. do they like lots of text, or pages broken down more? Do they like H1 tags? Do they still use meta tags? etc etc