Why does Yahoo! not like our site?

[ericpa]

Hello all,

We have spent many weeks trying to make our site "Yahoo! And Overture Search"-friendly, but we are still not being returned for any of our key searches.

For example - our first page:

[site.com...]

Ranked #1 in Google for various keywords - nowhere to be found in Yahoo! or Overture search partners.

For example - a country page (second-level):

[site.com...]

Ranked #1 in Google for some keywords - nowhere to be found in Yahoo! Or Overture search partners.

For example - a third-level page:

[site.com...]

Ranked #1 in Google for a couple of keywords but nowhere to be found for Yahoo! Search and Overture sites.

To optimize for Yahoo!, we constructed unique meta-tags for all pages (description and keywords), ensured keywords are in titles, descriptions, etc., made sure there is sufficient content (800 words+) per page, bolded our keywords and placed keywords into <h1> tags. We also added more keywords to each page so the keyword densities were closer to the optimum as described in a keyword density report

If you do a "site:http://www.site.com" search you can see most of our pages are apparently indexed, though we are getting 0 traffic and are not being returned for any searches.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Eric

[edited by: 2_much at 4:10 am (utc) on May 2, 2004]
[edit reason] removed site & keyword specifics according to TOS [/edit]

[cabos]

Eric,

Welcome to the club.

I know your site. It's an incredibly valuable resource.

Yahoo is excluding plenty of valuable, quality sites from its index.

Its about Yahoo increasing revenues at the expense of 1,000's of smaller, website owners.

Cabos

[mars9820]

Anyway I went to your page as well for a second and yes nice information (however I didn't like the popup).

I also took a quick look at your source and saw a lot of spaces (white lines) in the top of your document. No idea if spiders like it.

Besides of that I ran the page through the simspider of WW which you can find HERE : [searchengineworld.com...]

It will show what a spider sees. However it gave me a error 500. Which might be that Yahoo has a problem with it.

I as well ran your file through the w3c.org validator and as well overthere I got a problem.

May I ask if you ranked good before in inktomi and/or alltheweb?

[2_much]

Eric, it seems like you have most of the Yahoo optimization elements in place.

However, Yahoo places HUGE weight on inbound/outbound anchor text.

Do your inbound links have your target keywords as anchor text?

Are you target keywords linked within your pages?

If the answer is no, I would try working on these two issues to see if this could improve your rankings.

[IITian]

As a side note, the first site.com link to going to a real site not associated with the site we are discussing. Other links are going nowhere.

[atlrus]

From what I have seen recently - it's almost imposiible to rank good in Yhaoo and Google at the same time for the simple fact that:

Google - the keyword density should be less than 10 for your website to rank at all for that keyword.

Yahoo - bigger is better. Keyword density of over 25 will put you in the top results.

Of course, to every rule there is an exception, but here comes the hard part - do you want to be top on google or yahoo?

The only thing that comes to my mind - if you have more than one page indexed by yahoo - optimize it.

[ericpa]

Cabos,

Great to hear you are familiar with our site and find it useful. I have not had much luck getting information from Yahoo!, even after signing up for Site Match. They don't give advice on your page structure and/or what you are doing wrong.

mars9820,

Thanks for the info on the TOS - I wasn't aware of that - I see they have changed my URLs. The main URL is snipped (I think it's okay I post this?) The spider sim is very useful - thanks - I suspect that something's wrong with our page structure that the spiders don't like. We never ranked well with Inktomi or AllTheWeb.

2_much,

Thanks for your reply - inbound anchor text we have quite alot of. Outbound not so much. Many of the inbound links have the appropriate anchor text. Yes, we have placed target keywords within internal links.

atlrus,

Thanks for your insights. We rank well in Google largely because we have alot of inbound links with anchor text - I have increased keyword densities on all pages and this doesn't seem to have hurt our Google rankings too much, so I'm hoping we can do decently in both Yahoo! and Google.

Thanks everyone,

Eric

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 10:36 pm (utc) on May 2, 2004]
[edit reason] Not OK! :-) TOS 13, 20 and 25 [/edit]

[mars9820]

Anyway I checked your URL in yahoo and you are listed in the serps when you search on domain name so you have at least NO penalty or anything in that meaning. So at least you can relax about that.

Of course you should work on your page and try to improve it. I think you got some valuable tips in this thread and they should keep you busy for the next couple weeks. As well don't expect to be back in Yahoo too soon. It will take time. However keep an eye on your log files and carefully see if yahooslurp is spidering your whole page. If not you know which pages it goes to and which not and you can investigate further.

Good luck.

[soapystar]

when you say domain name serach do you mean domain or you mean domain.com.?

My experience is if you have pages from the Google index or prior to a ban in Yahoo then you will come up for domain.com but not just domain.

[mars9820]

Hi soapystar,

Interesting point you made and I did a checkup with the domain mentioned by the original poster.

His domainname is actually 2 words without a hyphen.

I did a search for him on domain.com which returned 14 URL's listed under his domain.

I did as well a search for domain which returns a lot of results from people linking to him but nowhere is his domain listed in the SERPS.

This is exactly like you indicated in your post :).

[soapystar]

Just a thought. Seems paying for a URL with INK or Sitematch makes it easier for them to put your url through a filter not previously applied. In other words considered fundamental to search quality but not able to be incorporated into the algo. I wonder how banned sites were actally added at an entry point that was a free add url such as on Yahoo or ALLTHEWEB. I wonder if the this could explain the selective nature of penalties being applied. If you went via the add url you are now being filtered but if found only through links you are less likley to suffer the outright ban.