Yahoo Search Engine and Directory

We don't rank for any of our key terms in Yahoo.com with our .com version but do in Yahoo.ca for our .ca version.

Another twist is that we have a no index no crawl in the META and a complete SE ban in our robots.txt file for the .ca verison of our site.

I'm wondering now if this redirect is the root of our ranking problems in yahoo. Has anyone had any experience or seen this before?

Thanks in advance!

It seems like somehow Yahoo might be seeing both versions of the site and is choosing to index the dot ca. But this is very confusing:

Another twist is that we have a no index no crawl in the META and a complete SE ban in our robots.txt file for the .ca verison of our site.

If you're using robots.txt to block bots from the dot ca version, Y! or any other SE shouldn't be able to index it (except as URL only by being picked up from links pointing to the pages). If a full entry is showing in the SERPs there's probably a problem with the robots.txt syntax.

But, before you get to checking that, there's a problem with the meta noindex. In order for a bot to see and obey the meta noindex it cannot be blocked from the page by robots.txt. If it can't see it, it can't obey it, leading to the possibility of being indexed, by URL only, anyway.

So, if you want the dot com version to be indexed and not the dot ca, your best bet is to unblock the bots in the dot ca version so they can see and obey the meta noindex. Then make sure the dot com is fully crawlable.

But...not sure how this would affect the dot com. If Y! has the dot com marked as a dupe, will it pop it back into the index as the dot ca version drops out?

I've already tried it both ways, doesn't help.

Thinking about things more, I don't think the IP redirect is the problem. I think this is reminants of having a previous penalty from Yahoo. If anyone has had experience with country IP redirects causing problems, please correct me.

I think it was that the company I work for had hired an SEO (before i came on board), who thought a link network was a good long term approach - idiot - and as a result Yahoo caught it and banned em all, ours included. Been over two years now with a brand new 200K site and still no rankings for us in Yahoo. sniff, sniff...

Google ranks us well (as they should, we are the authority in the industry for sure) and Yahoo currently ranks one of our competitors where we used to.

We can't ditch domains for many reasons - leaving me with no choice but to keep trying to get someone at Yahoo who can help, to listen.

So if anyone working at Yahoo search is reading this - sticky me and I'd be delighted to share the specifics and finally get this sorted.