How to get "un-penalized"

I've been penalized, I know why, and I need to fix it.

[markis00]

Well, for all who've read my post about a penalty incurred by Adsense; I've discovered now that I wasn't penalized for switching Adsense layout types.

I thought about it; and realized the same day that I posted links between two of my sites that happen to be irrelevant to each other.

I realized after reading the penalty thread in this area that what I had done could have incurred the penalty; in fact, it most likely did, and have since removed the links.

The wierd thing is; I only put a link from one site to the other; and both my sites were penalized. But this makes sense to me.

I haven't seen the link that was caught by yahoo removed yet; I'm wondering, in the next update, is it possible that Yahoo will realize the sites are no longer linking and remove this link; thus ending my penalty?

I have emailed yahoo about this problem; asking if indeed a penalty was implied, and am yet to hear back from them.

Does anyone have any experience as to how a Yahoo penalty can be resolved in this manner? Or how long it takes for Yahoo to update itself and realize the sites are no longer linking?

[randle]

markis00,

I wish I could contribute but I have not been able to move beyond ascertaining that I, in fact, have a penalty. I have had quite a few sites dropped from the Search results and despite repeated e-mails to all channels requesting confirmation, I continue to be at a loss as to what the problem may be. Duplicate content? Cross linking? On page? Off page? In the real world of optimization we are pretty tame characters, but it is possible we have crossed a line somewhere.

Without someone being kind enough to say, "yes, you are outside our guidelines, and have therefore been removed from the results", it is all pure speculation.

Tried, convicted and sentenced with no knowledge of the crime is a bit hard to take.

[markis00]

It is, isn't it randle.
I'm not performing on Google, never have been since update florida, and Yahoo was making up most of my traffic.

Without traffic from Yahoo my sites are somewhat dead in the water...

I got an email back from Yahoo, in fact I called them too. They gave me an email address, I emailed them the problem, but all I got back was an auto-response about the Yahoo directory...

They gave me the wrong email address obviously.

I was on hold for 20+ minutes too.

Can't say I'm too happy at all right now...

[helenp]

I think the correct adress is [e-mail], thats the only one that I got replies from,

the other is [e-mail]

[twebdonny]

>>>>>>>>>>I think the correct adress is [e-mail], thats the only one that I got replies from,
the other is [e-mail]<<<<<<<<

Yeah, Good Freaking Luck, they don't even followup on phone calls for paying customers.

[markis00]

Maybe they do follow up on phone calls, except they put you on hold for 20+ mins

it's a long distance call for freaking sakes

I'll try the webmasterworld addy, thank you

[twebdonny]

<<<<<<I'll try the webmasterworld addy, thank you<<<<<<<<

Like I said Good Freakin Luck, they don't even answer support email on the paid Sitematch accounts

[markis00]

That's just ridiculous.

Where is Yahoo Mike when you need him!

[markis00]

One more email off to the webmasterworld addy @ yahoo. Now to wait. I have a feeling I'll be waiting a long time

[markis00]

Sweet, they replied.

[textex]

What did they say?

[markis00]

Asked for my urls, waiting to hear back.

[jrs_66]

We got back in, after a 2.5 year penalty. Slow and painful, but it can be done. Do your indexed pages get displayed if you search on 'site:yoursite.com'? If so this is a very good sign, you just have to find out why you violate yahoo's guidelines, fix it, send them an email, a wait a few months.

If you want to sticky me your site, I'll gladly take a peek to see if I smell something funny.

jrs_66

[Daily Sparring]

Are you saying then that if you do a search for site:mydomain.com and the home page or index page do not show up, that you have been banned? Is it with the 'site:mydomain.com' or site:mydomain.com....

I did a search for the both and neither displayed our home page. Just pages with links to our home page. This feels like bad news....

[markis00]

2.5 YEARS?!?

Dear god.

[jrs_66]

Use site:mydomain.com

If your pages are not appearing at all, your screwed. Get yourself ready for a long road back...

[markis00]

My pages appear.

[Daily Sparring]

Now I am confused. Is it any domain appearing or the homepage? When I do the site search site:mydomain.com, the returning urls all contain my sites but some are third levels and others are www.mydomain.com/other_folder/great_information_page.html. Is this the same? Does it have to be the index or home page? If these other pages are displaying is that good enough to know we have not been banned?

[randle]

I have been having my challenges with Yahoo with many sites being removed. The commands are different. The one that I have found to be most representative of the situation for a particular site is; url:http://www.widget.com

The command site:domain.com produces results, often showing inner pages. Does anyone have good insight as to the differences? It appears to me that if your site does not show using the url:http://www.widget.com
command, your site has been removed from the results.

[Daily Sparring]

I sure hope that url:www.mydomain.com is not indicative of what is going on because if it is, that is not good.

[jrokesmith]

I'm not back in yet, but something has definately changed - I am able to see some pages of my site when I do searches like the ones mentioned above. I couldn't see the main page of the site and in some cases any of the pages when I did these searches a week ago. I am hoping that it will come back soon - this is the only glitter of hope I have.

[markis00]

I haven't been removed from the index, that's not the problem. The problem is my pages have dropped from their SERPS holdings because of a link

[markis00]

Odd, I checked my cahce today and I got the message "this cache cannot be found."

Maybe this means it's updating the cache of my page, which would result in it not finding that link anymore, and maybe even my penalty being removed!

*crosses fingers*

[helenp]

My penalty just got lifted........ but not in yet, hope wonīt take to long.
I know itīs lifted though slurp just spidered my homepage.......... and Yahoo verified it.

The best way seems to be the oficial e-mail address:
[e-mail]

It took me 5 months.. to get here.

[Rick_M]

I'll join the club. I run several web sites, and I do have some pages that link together, when appropriate. My biggest site is the only one affected. For the past two days, no traffic from Yahoo.

If I search for site:mydomain.com it shows 2 pages out of 27 (I have around 70k indexed usually). If search for just mydomain.com it pulls up my main page, and if I click the link to see "more pages from this site" it shows 70k pages indexed.

This is a site I've had for many years (archive.org shows files going back to August 2000). I have a lot of external links to the site (PR6 from Google, with some pages having been up to PR7 at times).

This really stinks. Only other weird thing is that when I search for my site's name, an old bigfoot.com/~name comes up first that redirects to my site's main page. My actual URL is nowhere to be found.

[cabbagehead]

Since the penalties appear to come primarily from Inkotmi PFI submissions ... does anyone know if it is possible to have a penaltly removed by asking PositionTech to have your paid inclusion removed from the index?

[cabbagehead]

Also, I use a sub-domain of www.xyz.com which is go.xyz.com for certain activies...and there are lots of links back and forth between www and go because go is a sub section of the main site. I have seen however where Yahoo writes that "massive domain interlinking" can be a content violation. Anyone suspect this would be enough to get a site penalized?
Nothing else really makes much sense to me as to why xyz.com is penalized. :-\

[Rick_M]

I just checked and I am also no where to be found on MSN. I had traffic yesterday at MSN, and none today - and my URL is no where to be found. Still have that same bigfoot.com/~myname redirect showing for my site's name, but no other pages from the site. All my other sites (included several on the same server) are still in MSN as well as Yahoo - just the main site gone from both. I'm still in Google and no major changes there.

I checked and I didn't change my robots.txt file, and my .htaccess file doesn't appear to have any problems.

It seems an odd coincidence that both Yahoo and MSN would penalize my site with 24 hrs of each other after years of no problems. I guess I'll wait to see if I hear back from either Yahoo or MSN. Hopefully I won't wake up tomorrow to find this site is missing from Google as well.

Additionally, Slurp has basically stopped visiting my site since yesterday. msnbot is still crawling my site as usual today.

I don't expect anyone to have ideas - but if there are any - I'm more than happy to hear it. This really stinks.

I checked my overall traffic numbers, and it seems that Yahoo and MSN combined provided about 20% of my traffic. I am thankful it isn't google that booted me (fingers crossed)

[cabbagehead]

Regarding the use of site:xyz.com ... I noticed my penalized site's index page is not listed here but all other sub pages are. Is this a property of a penalized site or just a quirk in my case?

[cabbagehead]

Rick_m,

Last I checked, I believe MSN is still being powered by Yahoo. There's rumor MSN may go live as early as July, but in the meantime MSN and Yahoo are one in teh same. There have been reports of lagging sync between the two, but that's a temporary cycle machanism I'm guessing.