I believe that Phoenix was the first on this board to give tips for optimizing for Yahoo!, based on personal observations. One of the tips was to include keywords in the URL. At the time, just on a few random searches, that seemed like a good thing to try to optimize for their new engine.

With a new (do I call it an "update?") Yahoo! update, it seems like there are now relatively few pages with the exact keyword phrase in the URL. This is just an observation, and not a tried and true fact.

Just wondered if this was perhaps a new "penalty" of Yahoo's, as many SEOs do name their URLs in an attempt to raise rank? The best anectdotal evidence I have for it is that a competitor of mine is ranked high for all his keyterms in Google, yet now nowhere to be found on Yahoo! and he ONLY uses keyterms in the URL to name pages. He was high in the Yahoo! SERPs when their new engine rolled out but now is literally off the map.

Obviously it could be other variables, but just a quick look at Yahoo! results seems to at least point in this direction.

Thoughts, comments?