Vanishing PFI Homepage Resolution! Hooray.

My homepage is returning to the serps!

[kanetrain]

Several months ago (5 I think) after signing up for Inktomi PFI, my homepage disappeared.

After months and months of working to get to the bottom of this issue it appears that my "vanished homepage" is finally returning to the serps! Looks like Yahoo is in the middle of an "update" or upgrade of some kind. When I get the "new" results, I see my homepage back in the serps! I can't tell you how happy and relieved I am right now.

It looks like Yahoo is solving the "vanishing homepage" problem!

I'd like to thank the Yahoo staff, especially Tim, for coming to this forum and answering questions and working on resolution to this problem (and others). If you too have experienced a vanishing homepage (where your entire site appears in the serps, but your homepage is nowhere to be found) email [e-mail] and explain what has happened.

Yahoo's presence here has been a godsend for us and the resolution to this just made my month. I will be increasing my Overture spend tomorrow as a result.
Let me quote from a post I made on March 1st (after pubcon) in a thread about Yahoo search and the vanishing homepage problem:

“One thing I took away from the conference was that Yahoo is listening to the webmaster community to get feedback on how to make it work. That, alone, is really good news. I am definitely rooting for Yahoo! Even though I do VERY well on Google, the diversification is good for the market and good for webmasters' in general.”

I hope I'm not speaking too soon. if these results stick, I'm a converted Yahoo Search fan. In the "new" results, it also looks like they've filtered out a lot of the spam that was showing in the serps in my industry too, which is a good thing.

Are any others who experienced the "vanish" and emailed yahoo about it seeing their home pages return?

[walkman]

I hope you're right. Your site was fine.
My site is "in" too, but they're Google results and almost never show up. Did you check them with Google's results?

[kanetrain]

These are definately "new" Yahoo results. They had been appearing periodically over the last few days but they seem to be settling in more consitently now... I've seen them on this PC since last night.

It looks like a new algo, and my vanished homepage is definately back! Hooray! Ahhhh... maybe I'll be able to sleep at night again :)

[helenp]

Please, while sleeping, think of the rest of us, .......... still waiting

[walkman]

well congrats then. Hoping for a general amnesty, parole or whatever over here :)

[kanetrain]

I'll be crossing my fingers for you all!

[steveb]

Last week mine was in one of the two indexes but not the other; early this week it finally stuck in both; the update hit and I did gain a lot of free pages (good Yahoo), but my main page got lost again. I'm hoping that this will likely get sorted out in a few days again, but if you pop back in don't be surprised if you pop back out at least temporarily.

[DavidT]

Well my home page just 'popped out', first time ever, so they still seem to have some problems in the area.

[caveman]

kanetrain, same here. There's hope for the rest of you. :-)

[walkman]

did you guys have editorial bans, or just weren't on? Did Slurp! just get your robots.txt before this?

Maybe they started with a clean slate, who knows. I banned slurp, I got too emotional :) watching slurp ignore everything...especially as I see money being lost.

[caveman]

It was impossible to get a straight answer from the reseller or INK, but in our case, we believed it was related to a redirect and INK thinking that our *newer* homepage was dup content of the original homepage.

[kanetrain]

Exactly the same issue as caveman. We couldn't ever really tell exactly what it was... but we think it was INK thinking that we had a different homepage.

I'm just glad we are back in. I'm rooting for all of you.