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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!
Yahoo seems to be in no hurry to add my pages to its index. Anyway, today thus far I got 2 hits from Yahoo for these new pages which is more than twice my average from Yahoo. Seems like I am not banned. Penalized maybe, but banned no.
Another viewpoint is that I am not penalized but since Yahoo is so overwhelmed crawling sitematch urls and indexing them under its contractual obligations, it just does not resources to deal with sites like mine. Moreover, my pages competing with sitematch pages has the potential to reduce Yahoo's earnings which tends to make 15-30 cents per click from its sitematch customers; so I can see the incentive for delays or penalties.
So there goes my theory. Actually I have stopped thinking about Yahoo; will check again in a few months again, and so on.
My suspicion is falling more on more on some software issues. Once I got a hit under "kw1,kw2,kw3,kw4" and when I checked again with commas removed my site was not to be found and such incidents.
The site has been going for a few years and has hundreds of incoming links, including all of the big directories. The site gets very good rankings on competitive phrases in all other engines.
The only reason I can think they would have to apply a penalty is because of cross linking between this site and 2 of my other sites. To an algo the links might look like spamming but to a user they are clearly not.
I've emailed the address provided here but have yet to receive a response. If they let me know exactly what the reason is I'll most likely change it. Has anyone else had a problem with cross linking like this?
This couldn't have happened at a worse time for my site, peak season :(
I see this happening to many sites it seems but Yahoo gets better treatment from webmasters than Google does but Yahoo is doing a terrible job already.
Can you send me a sticky with your URLs, or can you share them on the list? I want to see what similarities I can find between my sites that have been affected and yours.
Judging from what earlier posters have said about re-inclusion timescales it looks like my site will miss the peak season in Yahoo for this year :(
I don't wish to bad mouth Yahoo as I think they're doing a good job overall. They just need to learn from Google that responding to webmaster comments, especially those that go to the webmaster world address they provided us with, will go a long way towards getting people on their side. I like to think that the fact that I'm losing income and having to re-organise things as a result of their algo would at least get me an automated response, or a ticket number in a queue.
My site has never used PFI and yes it is travel. It's been listed in all of the other engines in it's current state for a couple of years. It used to get good postitions in Ink before Yahoo started tinkering.
The site has unique content on every page (around 450 pages total), all of it original and good quality. It's not one of these 50,000 pages built from affiliate feed sites. It does have affiliate links but only around 50 - 60 links to affiliate programs in the whole site.
The site is built from a local database and the pages are uploaded. I suppose the templating system may be to blame for the penalty, could Yahoo have applied a penalty after detecting similarities in all pages?
I really believe that the cross-linking is the reason for my penalty, although I won't know until Yahoo get back to me. I don't really want to change it as I believe it's useful to visitors, although if it's my only way back in to Yahoo I may have to consider alternatives.
Send me a sticky with your url ... I'm pretty anxious to see what other sites have this problem look like (linking structures etc).
Wonder if we could get any input from the Yahoo guy here? It would be nice just to know that our emails have been received.
The most likely theory is this. I have many sites together on a dedicated server using the same IP. The sites are not linked together but relevant sites are linked together. I guess that one of the sites got a penalty and the other gets the penalty as well because of the IP address.
I have made arrangements for new IP addresses to see if that is the problem, but it has been 10 days and nothing changed.
The strange thing is that in the SERPS there appear sites that seem to pick up the code of my main pages and when clicked on it the user is taken directly to the site. I have contacted one of those sites and they don't even know it, they say.
It is very clear that Yahoo has an error in it's system that causes original sites to be pushed away and sites with illegal html code gets the benefit. That is why I call Yahoo a lousy search engine.
I am very sure that if you do a research on this you will soon discover weird things.
I believe this is the thread where I originally voiced my concerns with regard to my perceived Inktomi web site penalty. Three short weeks ago I sent an inquiry to webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com after reading Yahoo_Mike's suggestion here on WebmasterWorld, and I'm quite pleased to report that as of today the penalty has been lifted!
Over four hundred referrals from Yahoo/MSN today, and the hourly rate appears to be increasing. Thanks to WebmasterWorld, and thanks to everyone for their generous sharing of knowledge and advice!
Sean.
We've got a great product selection, easy to use pages with solid information, and a great staff of people behind the scenes. This setup was done to make things easy for users, but as of yesterday, Yahoo! somehow pretty much dumped all of our sites from the index after 6 years of being in there.
I've read the posts on here about too many interconnected sites, but I'm wondering if there is any way to make it clear that we're not spammers or doing anything to try to take advantage of their search system - we are simply trying to make it easy for people to use our sites, and our customers constantly say they love our format.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
BP
This must be affecting the size of Yahoo's search engine index and most likely the index is a lot smaller than it looks and gives wrong results and must be delivering very bad results for the users.
Regarding shared IP numbers. I am splitting up websites and assigning separate IP addresses for the domains. It's been 3 weeks since I started this and none of the changed sites have reappeared in Yahoo's search.
