Sudden change in indexing of Yahoo Store

Google is indexing our shop.store.yahoo.com address

[mhkatz]

After years of high ranking positions for our top keywords, Google suddenly stopped indexing our "official" url (www.----.com) and instead started indexing our Yahoo Store address (shop.store.yahoo.com/------). I don't understand why they have done this, since all of our incoming links go to our www.-----.com url. This has caused a steep drop in our rankings. Is there a way to get Google to go back to indexing our normal url?

[Vadim]

I have no experience with shop yahoo so my advice may be impossible to implement or it may be not what you actually want, however, for what it costs I would suggest.

1.Add meta tags NOINDEX to the yahoo shop pages
2.Submit to Google removals tool the pages with NOINDEX

However in this case, naturally, there will be no your yahoo shop pages in the index.

See
[google.com...]
for the details how to do it

Vadim.

[tedster]

all of our incoming links go to our www.-----.com

Now that fact really points to something crazy on the Google back end. I would definitely suggest you write to Google about this, if you haven't already done so. The situation you describe just shouldn't be, and you may only tangle up the situation worse by trying this and that technical change on your own. At least that's how I see it.

What does the site: query show you?

[Marcia]

>>Now that fact really points to something crazy on the Google back end.

Tedster, there was something "crazy" going on right around Florida time with those Yahoo stores. The domain names *and* the Yahoo subdomains were turning up in SERPs even though they were duplicates of each other, and in some cases, different stores were indented listings beneath other stores on the same topic/keyphrases even though they were completely separate entities but also hosted as Yahoo stores. I remember sending in examples in reports several days in a row as I came across them - it was a real mess, with the top listings flooded with those duplicates and errors in URLs.

It's a serious crawl issue, but I wouldn't exclude any pages from the index lest it mess things up worse when they figure it out. IMHO it needs to be reported, not as a spam report, but with documentation to show the problem so it can be turned over to the crawl engineers to sort out.

[mhkatz]

Okay, I tried a site: search and here's what I found:

site:www.-------.com returns 106 internal pages, but NOT the home page.

site:shop.store.yahoo.com/---- returns 68 pages, including the home page.

There appears to be no duplication, so each page is indexed only one way or the other.

I went into our Yahoo Store Manager on Wednesday morning and put in a 301 redirect that applies to all pages. I'm not sure how much this will help.

Another thing I should mention is that two days ago, when I discovered the problem, Google was not showing any backlinks from our home page. The backlinks have since come back, but the incorrect url is still being returned in the SERPS.

[mhkatz]

UPDATE:

As of this morning, Google is once again indexing our home page using the correct URL and we have regained our previous rankings for the keywords in question.

Google is still indexing 48 of our internal pages using the shop.store.yahoo.com URL.

[tedster]

301 redirect that applies to all pages

How excellent that Yahoo Stores allows this. It is exactly the right thing to do, IMO, but so many "e-commerce solutions" don't allow their clients to set it up.