Yahoo What gives? How do you tell if your penalized?

It's really too bad.

You can say that again, 2_much. When quality sites get nuked for no reason and there's no effective appeal mechanism, it's scary...

"we dont use affiliate links
our site uses asp if that is an issue, but shouldnt cause when its rendered it looks like plain htm.
our domain name is a popular keyword and our sites content reflects this with out any trickery..
anyhow.. i see alot of people posting to this but has this done any good?"

There must be hudreds of you out there. I'm seeing reports of this on all the major search forums around the web.

What's most disturbing is that Yahoo is completely silent on the issue. They won't respond to posts here or anywhere regarding this issue. I can't believe they rolled out the *new* Yahoo search (see Inktomi repackaged with a new name) without fixing these bugs. It's absolutely amazing.

Most of the official posts that I have read here in the ww forum from Yahoo people, just ignore the issue. Lots of talk about how we can give them more money with their new program, but nothing addressing the past issues with the Ink system. They may be hoping if they just ignore the problem it will go away. I have a feeling this time they might be wrong, but who knows. We have dozens of domains and none of them are banned anywhere except Ink. I don't think AV and Fast have the same type of problems, but Yahoo is dead set on using the Ink system even though it's clear there are major problems with the index and the way it is reindexed. This just blows my mind.

You're hitting the nail on the head Hutch.

I agree with what MarkHutch said, Im seeing the same sort of thing myself for domains that I operate.

Although, if (as is likley)Y! choose to replace existing av and atw db's with rejigged Y! stuff, the problem will simply grow.

Many many questions remain unanswered. Y! isn't really doing itself any favours, especially amongst the webmaster community.

At present, I have little if any confidence in their new program for many of the reasons outlined by other posters.

There are too many ifs and buts for my liking.

A very recent example; a url was submitted via a Y! search partner to be included in the INK db ( suddenly changed to Yink, no wait, owned by Y!, um no forget that..) anyhow, as I was saying they paid a Y! search partner to get in the 'search engines' because they couldnt be found in msn or yahoo. So they used a pfi per url inclusion program, partner took their money, and low and behold, they only appear for www.domain.com searches.

They fire off an email to Y! (as INK and the search partners ignored their request for help) and asked if there was any problem with their url, and..yup! you guessed it, they were told that their domain was blocked from the index.

I say full marks to Y! for telling them the score, but as has been said, in most cases Y! dont even know why a domain is blocked in the first place! I think this is grossly unfair. In the very least they should either

1. give existing and new pfi's the benefit of the doubt, and if they are still unsuitable then refund their money.

2. give site owners some kind of review process that enables a fresh consideration of old and unknown penalties.

3.admit that their current policy is unworkable and just scrap the old banned list and move things forward.

Lets face it, the technology has moved on, the algo's are more sophisticated now, spammy content is relativley easy to filter, starting afresh wont mean that any new index would necessarily be full of crap.

No ones perfect, people make mistakes, its no big shame on Y! if they were to hold their hands up and say.."Ok guys, we've listened, heres how it is......and it is for these reasons that we believe that you can now have full confidence in a fair, equitable Y! search"

In other words, odds are that most of the URLs that aren't already in the Y!-dex (especially now that they've started doing the free submits again), are not there BECAUSE they've been blocked to begin with. So why bother PFI'ing them since they'll STILL be blocked and only come up at the very bottom and thus produce no clickthrus anyway? I guess another sucker with $35 IS born every minute.

I reached the conclusion, a while back, that the only way to get back in Yahoo/INK for questionably penalized PFI customers is to add new domains and start spamming. After all that's all Yahoo is now spam. I've been dealing with the Ink problem since September 2003, when it began, and still I'm getting the exact same run-a-round. Most people never noticed the problem until the switch.

I can't support any review process period. With all the redirects, junk, and doctored meta tags I'm seeing in Yahoo now I want to be judged just like those sites. The questionably penalized paid customers deserve better treatment not more hoops to jump through. I'm not talking about better rankings I'm talking about unpenalized inclusion.

Exactly Outland...

It isnt about asking for better rankings, its about being able to play on an even field.

Somehow Y seems convinced that their anti spam algo works.
It doesnt! Its stale.

I'm about to split up my site into numerous sites. Register them under each of my corporate names. Not cross link them and buy some quality links pointing to each one. The main site I run is large, so I can easily turn it into 20 smaller sites without duplicating content.

They will each get into the Yahoo index for their related content, and do well.

I have seen this with a few other little sites I run that are included and do well in the Yahoo SERPs despite the fact that they dont compare in freshness and content quality to my main site.

To date I have followed SE spam guidelines, as best I could, knowing that my current income depends on being in the SERPs. I have always said dont push the envelope too far as it's better to have some good SERPs, perhaps not as many as you'd like, than be banned from an engine.

Well, it hasnt mattered to Yahoo. So, time to really spam Yahoo. What difference does it make as they arent willing to work through problems faced by legitimate, quality sites?