SEO Question: I rank #3 in Google for one of my core keywords and yet I am nowhere in it for Yahoo!. Why?
SEO Answer: Just because Google is viewed as the hardest search engine to manipulate, that does not mean that if you rank there you will also rank elsewhere. Each search engine has their own relevancy algorithm which determines how results are ordered. Over time those relevancy algorithms for each engine change, and they are never going to be the exact same at different engines.
I looked at the query and site in question, and in this instance, there was lots of link spam ranking competing sites high on Yahoo!. Those sites had 3 to 10 times as many links, and apparently Yahoo! likes garbage links a bit more than Google does, at least in this instance, at least right now.
Since many of those spammy sites were dominating Yahoo!, that meant that their rankings suppressed many garbage sites. Abhilash recently made a great post on this topic. Outside of having a ton of link equity or a killer brand, ranking across all the major search engines for certain keywords (especially in competitive areas) might be mutually exclusive.
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