Site Structure
Site structure is an important SEO factor for Yahoo! for two key reasons. First, it determines the order in which your page content gets seen by the search engines and thus, which content will be given the highest priority. Content that occurs higher up in the code of your page (not necessarily in your browser) is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code.
Second, a properly structured website will be lower in code through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use, etc. The reduction in code will simply push the content higher up the page as far as a search engine is concerned and thus, it will be given more weight.
Aging
Website aging is another SEO factor for Yahoo! employs a “sandbox” similar to that of Google as well, though it is lighter and lasts a shorter duration of time. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for a while. The aging delay on websites has been extended over the past couple years however it isn’t as severe as that imposed by Google. New sites can expect to find it really difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of 6 months even if everything else is in place. To add to the difficulty is a delay on the value of links. When a new site launches it obviously has no links. These links are subject to a delay that appears to be somewhere between 3 to 4 months before they hold their full weight.
The combination of these delays can make it really difficult for new sites to rank for competitive phrases inside of 8 to 12 months however because the restrictions are lighter than those imposed by Google one can expect to see rankings for secondary, tertiary and completely unexpected phrases far faster on Yahoo!
