Yahoo penaties

Are penalties affecting whole site or just pages?

[Candleman]

Until just recently I had been ranking well in Yahoo for some pretty productive keywords. (making money from affiliate sites) After the Yahoo change I thought I had been banned from their serps.

I still have good ranking with some keywords, but nothing like before. My question is, Does Yahoo just ban or penalize certain pages in a site or do they ban the site as a whole?

I know I could ask Yahoo about the problems but I don't want to draw attention to my site in case they decide to ban the whole site. I don't spam or anything illegal like that but, with their new quidelines I don't want to take the chance since there are probably three or four sites in the entire Internet that would meet their standards.

[2_much]

My experience is that if it's a ban, the whole site goes down, not just pages.

[MrOwen]

I have a new site, launched 4.5 weeks ago and made in in the top 10 for top three keywords, but now I'm nowhere to be found. If I've been accessed a penality how do I find out and who do I contact?

[Yahoo_Mike]

If you think your site(s) have been penalized, you can email Yahoo at: [e-mail] and request an editorial review.

[doc_z]

If you think your site(s) have been penalized, you can email Yahoo at: [e-mail] and request an editorial review.

Is there a chance to get a reply from Yahoo after sending them such a mail?

For example, 'your site was reviewed ...', 'there is no penalty ...' or something else.

[seanpecor]

I have some of my own findings to share that are related to your question.

Firstly, I believe I have an old Inktomi penalty that just won't die. I run one of the more popular marketing-oriented niche vendor directories. I get roundabout 5,000 visitors daily from thousands of external links, and Google, and Overture PPC. Despite Yahoo being the #2(?) search engine out there, Yahoo SERP referrals represent only about 1% of this traffic.

So, two weeks ago, I decided to sign up for Site Match to see if doing so would eliminate this perceived penalty, on a site-wide basis or just for the pages I "pay" for in SERPs. I added 4 state directory URLs and 2 city directory URLs.

Since I publish content structure changes with an embedded revision number in the page, I can track when the pages are updated in Yahoo's index. Over the past two weeks I've been able to publish two more revisions of the site and for each of those 6 Site Match pages I've been gradually moving up to the first 10 results for targeted phrases.

HOWEVER, this morning I've noticed something disturbing to me: Yahoo included a few additional pages from my web site this morning - state and city directory URLs that are not covered by Site Match and they are NOWHERE to be found in the first 100 results. Therefore, my results indicate that per-page URL penalties cannot be ruled out completely.

Here are censored/anonymous examples of my results. These Site Match and "Free" URLs share an identical structure (same revision number), except for the vendor listings and the geography navigation. The term ">#100" means that the url doesn't appear in the first 100 results.

Site Match SERP URLs:

twoword phraseA in denver (#1 in SERP)
twoword phraseA in denver colorado (#1 in SERP)
denver fourword phraseA (#2 in SERP)
texas twoword phraseB (#5 in SERP)
minnesota twoword phraseB (#5 in SERP)
california twoword phraseB (#2 in SERP)

"FREE" SERP URLs:

twoword phraseA in amelia (> #100 in SERP)
twoword phraseA in amelia ohio (> #100 in SERP)
owensboro fourword phraseA (> #100 in SERP)
kentucky twoword phraseB (> #100 in SERP)
delaware twoword phraseB (> #100 in SERP)
new york twoword phraseB (> #100 in SERP)

Here is a funny result. When I search for:

brooklyn twoword phraseB

I actually show up at #52! Only, it's for my Site Match URL for Minnesota, because there is a city called Brooklyn Park in Minnesota :). My Brooklyn New York page is nowhere to be found.

So, here are some potential reasons for these findings:

1) If your site is penalized by Yahoo/Inktomi then you can lift the penalties - but only on the URLs you pay for through Site Match. If this is true then Yahoo is essentially holding penalized site publishers page's ransom. I hope this isn't true.

2) Yahoo "rescores" Site Match URLs immediately, while free URLs are included in the index but not re-scored for a lengthy period of time. In other words, if I'm seeing a free "revision 16" in Yahoo SERP, it still may have the "revision 14" scoring.

3) Penalties don't go away with Site Match, but Site Match URLs are given a boost. If this were true then Yahoo would be lying about Site Match and it's relation to normally spidered results.

4) Anyone else's thoughts?

Sean.

[helenp]

I saw the other day, an penalized site searching for my usual search term,
with an sitematch page indexed in serps,
the page was duplicated, (same as original homepage penalized I supposed)
they even called the page whatever-Inktomi....=done for Inktomi, some days later that sitematch page disappeard as well.

[jrokesmith]

It seems like my site has a penalty, but I am not completely sure. I originally thought I had some kind of penalty since the home page of my site disappeared from the results set (n=1000) for a highly relevant set of keywords. After checking deeper down in the SERP, I was able to find several other pages from my site in the results set for these keywords, but not my home page.

If I search for mydomainname.com, I the home page (listed in the yahoo directory), but no other pages. If I click on the see more pages link next to the home page, no other pages are displayed.

However if I search like this site:www.mydomainname.com or site:mydomain.com, I get hundreds of pages from my site.

It doesn't seem like the site is banned, but it does seem like the index page has been penalized somehow. I have sent a reinclusion request after making some fixes, but as I am thinking about it, maybe there is something else more obvious that could be triggering this problem. Does anyone have an idea what is going on and if so would they be kind enough to share?