I never gave Ink an awful lot of thought as long as Y! was using Google results. When running page ones for all my terms on both, why bother messing with success? I still do okay with Y! as long as the search terms are a bit longer, but nothing on the shorter versions that have a lot more results. I see Geocities pages coming up first with few instances of terms and 1-2 incomings scoring above known and established entities that are all about the search terms with hundreds of incomings.

Is Ink a bit more sensitive to over-optimization than G is? Any other ideas as to what G considers good SEO that Y! does not?

Thanks

Inktomi is more "on the page" focused and tends to give more credit to some random links that I believe Google does not weight as heavily. I also have seen a free host subdomain page rank at #2 for "lexapro" on MSN and
1.) there was no site at that page
2.) it only had less than a dozen guestbook spam backlinks when you checked its backlinks on Y!

this was only about a month ago that I saw that page there, but it is not on the first page now.

I think it is still hard to put a finger on what Yahoo is really up to. Their delay in Slurp crawls is bad, but the delay in those pages getting into the index after the crawl is even worse.

A lot of the pages you see in the Yahoo index are dated. (Thus Aaron's accounting of a page that does not exist any more). By the time you figure out what Yahoo is doing, it will be a couple of months before you can actually see those results. By then, they may change the landscape on you and nothing will apply.

They do seem to be susceptable to meta descriptions on the Home Page, but not your main landing pages. I have seen time and time again where if the keyterm was in the description on the home page it took precedence over the actual page buried one click away. This is pretty bad when your visitor clicks on that result and cannot see a link to what they are looking for too readily. I have lost many people landing on my home pages from Yahoo searches this way.