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I am having a tough time getting our sites indexed at Yahoo, and Google for that matter. Is there anyway to find out if a site has been penalized and why it was flagged?
Thank you so much for your help!
This is not always the case, our url www.widgets.com shows up just find, along with all sub pages; however, it is never visited by slurp, nor will any of the pages show up in any Serps, ie penalty imposed. Do a search for widgets, leave out the www and .com, and if u cannot find your site, u can assume penalty. Best of luck to you, we continue to await a review to have our penalty from Inktomi
removed.
Cherie and Donny
My website is being visited daily by the Slurp, and looking at my logs, over 1,000 pages have been visited by it.
But at the same time, Yahoo shows a cache of my home page which looks like it used to 2 months ago, and this is what happens when I use different commands:
1. When I click on "More pages from this site" it shows only 3 pages.
2. When I use site:www.WebmasterWorld.com, webmasterworld = the name of my website,it shows 6 pages
3. When I use site::www.WebmasterWorld.com, it shows all the pages the Slurp had visited (1,000+), and my home page is updated to reflect it's current look.
It's all very weird, but what I am really concern with is why Yahoo does not update the cache of my website?
And I dont have penalty, because one of my pages pank #8 for a keyword.
It would be really nice if Yahoo_Mike shed some light on what is going on.
Thanks.
Hello, as most of you know, if you need to determine if a penalty has been levied against your website, please email Yahoo at webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com.
I've e-mailed this address twice and had no response. My first e-mail was about three or four weeks ago. My site also does not appear in the serps but occasionally appears when typing site:www.mysitename.com (there are currently at least ten pages of results for site:www.mysite.com)
My site gets 'slurped' most days but is yet to appear after a couple of months of 'slurping'. I can only think that I must be penalised but I cant see why as the site is completely clean. The only thing I can think of is that there is another site that uses our logo and a similar name, but this is a branch of our business that we sold off three months ago and completly unrelated to us now. It would be nice if yahoo could let me know one way or the other though.
[help.yahoo.com...]
This has rather taken me by surprise.
I've been wondering why my site hasn't been coming up in the Yahoo! SERPS and thinking surely Y! would have had time to include it by now. There's no obvious penalty criteria.
Finally a result. I submitted my fledgling RSS feed (started in February) to Y!'s Beta aggregator service in late April. I update the RSS feed (and the respective articles) usually once every 24 hours.
Now, for a number of given search terms both the page containing the originally researched articles and the corresponding RSS newsfeed is coming up in the SERPS.
Well, it's a start...
Isn't something wrong with the guidelines if the original site gets the penalty instead of the search engine spammers?
I don't give much for Yahoo answers on this. Yahoo has beaten Google by large in telling absolutely nothing but useless information.
My experience: SiteMatch thumbs down, Yahoo search thumbs down and Yahoo customer service thumbs down.
I call on all sites being penalized by Yahoo to do something about it and speak out. Yahoo has to listen eventually like Google did and fix their stupid search engine that is full of spam or change the guidelines.
There is nothing the algorithm can pick up that a human reviewer couldn't (i.e. there is no hidden text, cloaking, stuffed css, nothing). It's a clean HTML only site.
can someone PLEASE shed some light on what to do next?
To add insult to injury, nearly all of my SERP results aren't my site url, but rather a 301 redirect from another site that has a redirect script or, worse, they've framed my site and are leaching visitors.
I sent feedback to webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com on 5/3/04 and pray I'll get a response or a penalty removal at some point in the future. I'm fairly confident this will get sorted out; I just wish that I'd get a more prompt response given that I spend about $1,000 a month advertising through various Yahoo properties. Oh well.
Sean.
Hello, as most of you know, if you need to determine if a penalty has been levied against your website, please email Yahoo at webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com.
Mike, I have sent an e-mail to that address about our site, but never received a response. How long does it usually take to hear something back?
When I search for "mysite keywordone keywordtwo" -- the number one search result is an affiliate who bought a similar domain name and copied my entire site content. He added Google AddSense and one of our affiliate program banners to the bottom of the site. Our domain does not show up anywhere...
If I search on "www.ourdomainname", I get two listings from our domain, and nothing else.
While I'm waiting to hear back from Yahoo, does this sound like a penalty to anybody else here?
Now, once again, my site is nowhere to be seen.
Cannot for the life of me figure out what filter I must be tripping...
I wish Yahoo! (or one of the search engines) would come up with a spam-proof scorecard for webmasters that you could validate your pages against, so at least you would know if the page wasn't included because it broke a rule or because the index hadn't been updated that far yet...
I know... the Search Engines are wary of giving too much of their algo away... but they could throw in a couple of 'good practice' red herrings, and they need not give the weight of each of the positive guidelines / things to avoid.
I know... the Search Engines are wary of giving too much of their algo away... but they could throw in a couple of 'good practice' red herrings, and they need not give the weight of each of the positive guidelines / things to avoid.
and yet more than one poster has stated getting a site reincluded after being given exact reasons for the ban. So, its ok for some, it doesnt hurt the integrity of the serps by giving a selected few direct hands on help.
Its too easy to think that some people are getting a better deal from Yahoo in this respect but I don't see any evidence of that. Urban myth I think. Be nice if they WERE that helpful but the implications of them doing so has a knock-on effect.
Don and Cherie
I have. I received an e-mail confirming they were going to look at it - some hours later penalty was lifted.
So it can happen - but I understand the frustration of those still waiting.
Agreed - they said that to me too.
>When you say it was lifted what happened a few hours later?
The penalty was lifted and pages appeared on the first page for targeted keywords
>Did spidering begin?
Spidering never stopped - all site pages were in PFI.
>Did you ever have it confirmed that you had a penalty/ban?
Yes - Yahoo confirmed that I had triggered a penalty.
A couple of other factors may have played a part:
a) I believe that the penalty was triggered by an algo trigger, not human review - I also thought I knew what it was and indicated why - but changed nothing on the site.
b) As the pages were already in the DB, lifting the penalty immediately restored the pages to where they should be - no respidering or DB update had to be done - which could normally take weeks.
>how long after.....did you recieve this follow up message?
Confirmation that I had a penalty was after 2 weeks - the statement that I was being put in for a re-review, about 5 weeks.
Seems the various types of penalties and ways to lift them are multi leveled and only certain types of penalties can/will have the flag raised from all levels.
At least google reply to e-mails (never had to wait longer than 2 or 3 days with them, have been waiting for 4-6 weeks for yahoo to get back to me). If I type in the name of my site I get loads of affiliates and link pages with us on but not our actual site. There are other sites that use some of our content and images, but we are the originals and yet we are the ones being penalised. We have 507 pages indexed by yahoo and not one appears in the serps. Its extremely unfair - we too spend money with yahoo and had paid for inclusion with inktomi.
I cant see yahoo challenging google like this. If anything they've made me think more highly of google.
While you were penalised did slurp gobble up your robots.txt and then leave?
The only people I know of that were out of the search results and have returned after a review were people who had actually done something that was against the guidelines in the past.
Meanwhile all the webmasters who are penalized not by their own fault but because OTHER sites link to them through redirects still are penalized. Seems a bit unfair to me.
Yahoo has admitted to their problem with handling redirects but it's been months since they said a fix was coming. Still waiting...
Neither show a Slurp or verticalCrawler crawl in the past 6 weeks.
The non-penalized site shows 3 hits from VerticalCrawler last month and 2 this month;
The possibly-penalized one shows 3 VertticalCralwer hits last month but 0 hits this month.
Does this seem typical?
Non-penalized site: Slurp is hitting a few times each day but only for / and robots.txt and the occassional file that existed 6 months ago.
Possibly-Penalized site: Slurp is consuming the Robots.txt file and each of the URLs submitted to Inktomi every 48 hours like clockwork.
It would appear that the only differences in the crawling of the two sites is that the Inktomi-PFI submitted pages are being crawled every 48 hours, for the site that was submitted to Inktomi PFI. It's not just the Ink-PFI submitted pages from that site however that are missing from the Yahoo results - all pages from that site are missing for all competitive phrases ... the site is however present for a few random non-competitive phrases. Meanwhile, the other site (not submitted to Ink PFI) is going great.
