A method is proposed for detecting damage to shear structures by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and only the first three natural frequencies of the translational modes. This method is able to determine the damage location in any story of a shear building with only two vibration sensors; to obtain modal frequencies, one sensor on the ground detects an input and the other on the roof detects the output. Based on the shifts in the first three natural frequencies, damage location indicators are proposed, and used as new feature vectors for SVM. Simulations of five-story, nine-story and twenty-one-story shear structures and experiments on a five-story steel model were used to test the performance of the proposed method.