Yahoo and 301 redirects

[SlowMove]

I used a 301 redirect from www.siteA.com/page1.html to www.siteB.com/page2.html. Yahoo is now showing jumbled SERPS with the content from www.siteB.com/page2.html over the old URL, www.siteA.com/page1.html, which always had different content.

[SlowMove]

Now, if I remove the redirect, it's as if siteA has stolen or duplicated the content from siteB. Hmmm...

[Tim]

We are working on improving our 301 redirect handling. You should notice an improvement in the relatively near future.
Tim

[nancyb]

Great! Thanks Tim.

Hope it is soon so I can delete all those 2-3 year old 301's I still have to maintain in my htaccess.

Noticed lately that when Slurp gets a 301 s/he has immediately "gotten" the redirected file.

[DaveN]

301's in yahoo aren't as bad has in other SE's believe me.... Nice to see Y! moving in the right direction yet again.

DaveN

[Kirby]

Tim, any suggestions in the meantime? Do we remove the redirects for the time being? Have the redirected URLs removed?

[Tim]

Kirby,
What is the effect that our handling of 301s is having on your URLs and what effect are you looking for. Having this info will help me answer your question.
Tim

[bcc1234]

Hey Tim, I asked this question in another thread (the one with questions for Yahoo), but it also deals with 301 redirects.

We have a site with a lot of incoming affiliate links that all result in 301 redirects to final landing pages on our site.

Could that cause a ban on our site and is there anything we could/should do to make sure we (and most importantly our affiliates) don't have problems with Yahoo crawler?

[Kirby]

>What is the effect that our handling of 301s is having on your URLs and what effect are you looking for.

Well it seems Yahoo still gets confused by redirects, but I realized what happened in at least one case. I had a domain parked at GoD****.com redirecting to another domain, but 'masking' was checked. I have since stopped all redirects, but the parked domain is now where the real site should be for a few keywords. Its #3 for one with the title "Coming Soon" and the snippet is:

"www.example.com coming soon! This page is parked FREE at GoD@@@@.com! Domain Names & Transfers. Enter a domain name: www. . com. .net . org . info . biz . us . ws. FREE with every domain: Change of Registration. Parked Page. Domain Locking"

Its funny except for the lack of traffic and the fact that the real domain only comes up now by doing a search for the domain, and if you put the domain in quotes without thee'www', it pulls the parked domain.

[Tim]

Kirby,
This problem will be fixed pretty soon. I would be patient we are working on it now and I wouldnt do anything on your end. If there are other cases let me know.
Tim

[Kirby]

Thanks Tim. I'll wait and see what happens.

For future reference, does Yahoo have preferences or guidelines with regard to url forwarding done at the registrar level?

[sid560]

Tim,

My sites have been removed from Yahoo just like others. I have two national top rated sites

I am looking at the content quidelines and wonder where to start. I, like others, believe my sites are clean. But I realize I need to do something to get back in.

What is the most likly reason to be banned. Is it

1. excessive keywords repetition
2. domain interlinking
3. link exchange with other sites.
4. other reason?

Thanks

[Tim]

Kirby,
It would be useful to post something like that. I will try to do that once we sort out the problem you are having otherwise it will be too confusing.
Tim

[Visit Thailand]

Tim - is there any update on this situation we seem to have been dropped from Y after many years and we do have a lot of 301's (reason when we switched from .htm to .shtml)

Any news you can shed on the situation please?

[scottyman]

Tim,

One of my client's was recently dropped by Yahoo. The site in question has no history of problems with Ink or Google so a penalty is unlikely.

I have two scenario's that I wonder if you could help with:

(1) Our express submission services with Ink recently dropped.
(2) Last month I set up a 301 re-direct from the .com to the primary .co.uk domain

Any thoughts or advice appreciated.

[seanpecor]

Hey Tim,

Do you have an update on when the 301 Redirect bug will be fixed? Back on April 3rd, you stated that a fix is coming out soon and to be patient. I'm still patient ;) but I was hoping to get a guesstimate on how much longer we should expect to wait before a fix ripples through the Yahoo index.

Among many many other examples, I've got a good deal of looksmart.com 301 redirects to my site that are appearing in SERPs. My site is a high-quality vendor directory so alot of commercial, academic and government sites deep link into sections of the directory. Currently those links appear in the search results as residing on the referring domain's web site, which misleads visitors and makes it difficult to track referrals from Yahoo.

Sean.

[Visit Thailand]

As there seems to be a lot of discussion of penalties and other reasons for disappearing from Yahoo! my main concern is the 301 problem.

For me it seems that it can be the only logical explanation fr disappearing from the SERPS.

One reason I say this is that we have a lot of internal 301's that go from a .htm to a .shtml with the same content (unique to each page) but mainly because I have seen occurences of domains I own which were purchased at Network Solution but have never been hosted anywhere not have they ever been live show up in the SERPS occassionally with my main site's title, description etc.

The reason for this i can only conclude is I use Network Solutions forwarding solution from some of the inactive domains to my main site.

Now for us it has been exactly 21 days sinc we disappeared from the index, and s of course we are affected by Y!, Av, and MSN.

Should I start making changes and if so what, has Y! given any updated statement as to when this problem might be solved?

Would internal 301's be causing the same problem as the external ones like I described above with Network Solutions.

I have no problem removing the forwarding from Network Solutions but if this is a Y! problem I do not want to start making changes in case it confuses Y! even more about my site.

[twright]

I'm having this "301" problem with a few of my clients as well - it seems that once the 301 was implemented, the listings for the main site dissappeared and the site URL with the 301 took its place in the listings. We were working with the client to make sure they didn't have duplicate content but now the "mirror" sites are indexed more than the main site. Crazy stuff. We can take out the 301s, but if Yahoo doesn't like them, why did they post this: [help.yahoo.com...]

[steveb]

The article seems to be being intentionally obtuse for some reason. Yahoo is just dropping the wrong URL, listing the redirecting URL instead of the real URL. A shorthand way to say that is the genuine URL is erroneously being treated as a "duplicate". It may not be exactly correct terminology but the meaning is pretty obvious.

[scottyman]

I would like to throw my hat into the any news camp. We have three sites which have dissapeared from Yahoo / Ink etc and they all have one thing in common, a 301 re-direct. I have e-mailed yahoo but had an answer. If I get one I will post it. Apart from the loss of traffic I have spent hours looking into possible penalties. Aghhh..

[mufad]

Hi Friends,
I have a website that tops google for competitive keywords but is no-where in yahoo.

I am using a 301 redirect from all www links to links without the www. In fact I have a url rewrite rule to redirect everything from [mysite.com...] to [mysite.com...] - this would include the robots.txt

The reason for this was that I got tired of requesting link partners who used the www in my link to remove the www - I figured that the permanent redirect would solve my problems.

I have my site included in the yahoo directory, the yahoo directory does not seem to allow urls without the www though, so the www version is present in the yahoo directory.

My yahoo webrank for www.mysite.com is 2 and my yahoo webrank for mysite.com is 6.

I have my main page url in overture sitematch, on 12th May, the report shows that I received around 30 hits for my keyword, it shows my rank at #10 on this day, but no hits before or after that one day. I have observed the Overture reports from April to June and the only day my account has received any clicks is on that one day of 12th May. I have confirmed from my access logs that the hits on this day have come from yahoo search for my keywords as reported by the sitematch report. I had not made any particular changes on this day that I can relate to having improved my rankings for a brief period.

Now, when I search in yahoo for mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com the first result is mydomain.com - this is good. But when I click on "More Pages from this site" Only one page the main page without the www is shown. The cache shows the latest version of the page.

I have a few subdomains that are linked to from the main site. If I search in yahoo for subdomain.mydomain.com and click on "More Pages from this site" for my subdomain, I find over 3500 pages in my subdomain listed!

The subdomains have different content from the main domain and do not employ any redirection. But even they do not receive any traffic from yahoo. They do however get traffic from google.

I find that the slurp crawler visits mydomain.com regularly, about once everyday, and the yahoo cache is updated - this may be because of my inclusion in sitematch but why are my other pages on my main site not being indexed. Why my site never shown in yahoo results even though it has a webrank of 6 and enjoys top listing in google. More importantly, why did it show in yahoo results for a breif perioid on 12th May? Could it have anything to do with the redirection?

These questions have been troubling me over the past several weeks and now I am glad that I can share with other webmasters. One other piece of the puzzle is that my site is like an article directory that webmasters can submit related articles which I later approve if relevant. This would cause my site to have duplicate content as the same authors would submit their articles to multiple sites and they usually have their own sites with their article already published.
Please Help with your comments and suggestions.
Thanks in Advance,
Mufad.

[DavidT]

Mufad I also redirect www to non-www and have never experienced any real, longstanding, problem with Yahoo. Sometimes they list both versions of the site, and both versions of internal pages, but my rankings are very good, it doesn't seem to have been a cause for a 'penalty'.