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?

[TravelMan]

If you are an affiliate marketer and want to do well with them, then you've got to make it seem like you aren't an affilaite marketer.

Besides the unique content issue, site owners need to use the tools at their disposal; xml, soap etc.

Overtime, I guess it all depends on how much search share Y! manage to grab or hold onto, and of course how G reacts post IPO.

IMO, affiliate programs who fail to recognise this stated 'means of exclusion' risk seeing a substantial fall off in income in the future.

Whilst I hate to say it so bluntly, its a simple case of adapt or die.

[cabbagehead]

Travelman,

XML is not a solution if Yahoo is sophisticated enough to recognize dupicate content on a sentence by sentence level. While you may be able to keep control over your interface, if you are going to use things like hotel descriptions etc on your hotel info pages, this mihgt very well come up as duplicate content.

...and from what I've seen ... Yahoo is completely ignoring my robots.txt file which told it NOT to disallow any of my affiliate content.

[soapystar]

cabbagehead

thats a very intersting observation. I too have specific instructions for Yahoo to spider my entire site. It certainly seems yahoo does not obey robots.txt

:-)

[carneddau]

"its a simple case of adapt or die"

Not whilst Google's still around it isn't. I know a couple of webmasters involved in the hotel affiliate market who are making some serious cash just from being in Google.

Speaking of hotel sites, I searched for a famous brand hotel today in a German city as my girlfriend is staying there this week and needed some info about it. Google returned the hotel's own website for the "brand city" search, perfect, just what I was after. The same search on Yahoo put the Yahoo travel listings as result 1 and 2 in the serps with the actual brand site at around number 15! If their reason for dropping hotel affiliate sites is to give the user direct access to the hotel's own site then it's just a bunch of old BS as it's all geared up to send the user to Yahoo's own partnership with Travelocity.

[cabbagehead]

"Yahoo is completely ignoring my robots.txt file which told it NOT to disallow any of my affiliate content. "

oops - type-o - I meant to say I told Yahoo not to spider a directory ... to disallow a specific directory, but it still read it anyway.

Soapystar - I think you still got my meaning. :)

BTW - I just tried putting meta tags directly in the pages that I don't want it to read in addition to the robots.txt file - will be interested to see if it ignores these as well.

[TravelMan]

as it's all geared up to send the user to Yahoo's own partnership with Travelocity.

Well..yes agreed, a reasonable thing to infer.

Altavista did the same once upon a time. They too got all greedy and went for the jugular...

G is still king of course :)

Y could learn a thing or 2 or 3 from G.

IMO a good relationship between se's and webmasters is built upon synergetic principles. Y would do well to heed this.

[markis00]

Anyone else get the new Yahoo customer satisfaction survey in their email? They sent this to me to ask how their support team handled my problem. Well, quite frankly, they didn't handle it, it's been almost three weeks and I'm still waiting to hear back.

I gave them a horrible review :)

[cabbagehead]

Ha - so they DO care? Or, they want us to think they do? Well, there's a 50% chance they do I suppose ... a step in the right direction at least. I never recieved a survey though. I wish I had - I have a few things to say. :)

[rhshinn]

Anyone else get the new Yahoo customer satisfaction survey in their email?

I did. For my "Case number" it showed a "Close date" of 6/9, which was well before the 6/18 date of the first Y! email response that I received. If that 6/9 date is correct, it also means that someone at Yahoo heard about my search problem (from one of the Y! addresses found here) well before I ever tried the reportsearchspam@ address...and never responded.

My Yahoo search problem has yet to be resolved, so my answers to a "customer satisfaction" survey at this point were obviously not very favorable to Yahoo. I sure don't want to believe that my "case" was closed 9 days before anyone from Y! responded.

[carneddau]

"I have a few things to say."

Same here. It'd be good to let them know that it's not nice to be sent an anonymous email from someone who basically tells you that your business is spam/junk. And what's more, you aren't allowed to be part of their search engine due to guidelines that they flagrantly disregard with their own website.

[MrOwen]

Our site has been penalized and I can't get Yahoo to reply as to why or get any feedback. I've tried multiple e-mails to the webmasterworld yahoo e-mail plus others. I even called their corporate offices only to be put on hold for 30 minutes. Is there anyway to contact Yahoo or as I like to call them the "Internet Search Mafia"?

[markis00]

Mr. Owen:

I called Yahoo too. It's long distance, they put me on hold for 20 minutes, and when I got off hold, they gave me the wrong email address. I really would like to vent right here and say what I think of them...

but I can't. Anyways, your best bet is the webmasterworld@yahoo addy, I believe it's [e-mail]

They got back to me next day, asked me what sites were penalized...I told them, and I haven't heard back for three weeks. Needless to say I didn't give them a good review.

I emailed them again today at that addy mentioning my support ticket number. I hope I get some kind of closure on this...from what people tell me Yahoo will hopefully remove the irrelevant link which caused my penalty in the next update. One person waited a month and a half and then they had some luck.

But unfourtunately, it's very easy for Yahoo to see that link, but not so easy for it to be removed...

I think that there should be some kind of manual control over search engines instead of all this automatic junk. One person should be able to hit a few keys and correct problems here and there remotely.

But it's all automated, and it's so irritating...

[markis00]

Well, they got back to me today.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post this, but if I'm not, moderators, you can just remove it.

Anyways, here's the song and dance I got from them today (3 weeks time)

snipped

Three weeks wait for nothing.

Thanks Yahoo. Why don't you just stick a knife in my back while you're at it.

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 12:23 am (utc) on June 26, 2004]
[edit reason] NO email quotes, TOS #9 [/edit]

[cabbagehead]

markis00,

Have you typed in your domain name "xyz.com"? Does it show up? If not, you're not indexed ... that's a different problem than if you are being suppressed in which case you would show up there, but not for any of yor keywords such as "xyz".

Is this something you have previously checked?

Cheers.

[outland88]

Markiss00

I did a quick check of the site in your profile. It seems to have no penalties at all. Are you referring to something else? A good many people who think they are penalized just have design and meta tag problems in Yahoo.

[bbonline]

I was searching at Yahoo when I discovered that when I searched for my business name at Yahoo a site appeared at top using my sales copy but is asking people to send money via their paypal account. This is both fraud and copyright violation and of course I have taken action on this, but I ask: Is this how Yahoo is expecting the search to work. Indexing fraud pages and pushing the originals into penalty? Yahoo is clearly letting the swindlers use the search to carry on their bad deeds.

Is this the way yahoo expects the search to workl?

Have you had similar experience?

[cabbagehead]

Yeah - It seems pretty clear Yahoo has some significant problems with their duplicate content algo. Everything from redirects to ripped off content .. everything that should NOT be causing a problem - is. This algo should be rolled back until its ready to go live for real.

[soapystar]

yup, that is bang on. They say your content is so bad it needs to banned for life yet all these others sites copying your content or simply redirecting to you are being happily being served to unsuspecting users. At some point its gonna dawn on them that human filters can never work and filters must be applied automatically based on content and not subjective individual opinions. However it comes back to my past point as to why they chose this route. Could it be that manual control of the serps is fundamental to what they are doing now and looking to achieve in the future?

[cabbagehead]

..oh, and let us not forget that pesky robots.txt file that it would appear that Yahoo is ignoring currently. For me, that could cause content duplication issues too, since my old versions of files are sitting in a directory with a robots disallow, until they drop from the SERPs.

So *many* issues. Yahoo - ya listening?!?!

[outland88]

I think the problem goes back to using the old Inktomi database and laying a duplicate filter over it. The old Inktomi crawled deeper than about every bot carrying many things that people never submitted to them or were aware of. Since traffic was generally poor from the Ink portals and so erratic most people never kept track of it or prepared for something atypical.

To step forward a notch when Yahoo implemented its filters the PFI sites were the first to disappear because Inktomi was using two databases. One for free sites and one for the paid. Inktomi denied this but was forced to admit to this once the evidence mounted. In effect combining the databases into one forced a situation of bumping content in one database or the other. That’s why PFI customers were howling long before anybody else. With the inception of the new Yahoo and the disappearance of the Google index people really begin to take notice. People are now finding that the filter is so aggressive that things they never saw in the old Inktomi are popping up everywhere. It displaces what you want in Yahoo. Logically webmasters implementing changes to correct the matter could damage their business elsewhere.

Bottom line is Yahoo’s perception is they are on the right track. Yahoo’s evaluations though are probably yielding a lot of things people never wanted in Yahoo to begin with. Vice versa things people wanted in Yahoo are nowhere to be found. Many site owners become victims and criminals in Yahoo’s eyes by default and just by injecting the word quality. Do I think Yahoo will change its methods? No. Are their simple ways to correct the problem? Yes I definitely feel there are.

[bbonline]

I have been seeing a fraudulent website in top results at Yahoo for more than a week, the site is down but the cache shows the page. I have reported to Yahoo but still the page get top listing.

Yahoo search is a complete crap, full of spam, fraudulent websites, never or seldom updated except for applying stupid penalties.

How long will webmasters accept this and start fighting back like they have done with Google in the past?

[scottyman]

It's a bit of a joke all of this is it not. Does anyone know how to distinguish between the 301 re-direct problem and a penalty. I have some clients with 301 re-directs who are indexed but just not appearing. No change out of Yahoo when I have asked about this issue.

[cabbagehead]

A few weeks ago I wrote to Yahoo to ask that they re-review my site for inclusion and asked that they please let me know if there is still a problem, what it is so that I can either address it or correct it. Here's the response I recieved:

"snipped"

snipped Yahoo is pretty snipped full of themselves at the moment - are they not?

I have thoroughly reviewed their inclusion requirements and am quite sure I am not in violation of any of their criteria. So now what? This is really nice...

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 5:27 am (utc) on June 29, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed email quote and "bad language" [/edit]

[cabbagehead]

By the way - anyone know how I can get my hands on their customer service survey? I have a thought or two to share.

[cabbagehead]

Ha - so I'm not allowed to quote emails from yahoo?

The above email quote basically said they they've reviewed my site but the status hand't changed. They gave absolutely no indication what was wrong, what could be done to fix it ... nothing.

[bc34me]

I also am having trouble in Yahoo search. I have checked site:yourdomain.com, my pages are there. But if I search for my site by its title, it no longer appears. If I search for keywords, site no longer appears, used to be #1 or #2. I'm not sure if Yahoo thinks I'm spamming, or if something is wrong with tags, or what. Any ideas?

Thanks

[bbonline]

You seem to have gotten a Yahoo penalty bc34me. The reason may be that you don't follow the guidelines or your site have been mirrored by other website and your website is being thrown out. You are not alone. This is happening to a lot of webmasters but the worst is Yahoo isn't doing anything to fix their "full of errors and junk" search engine.

[bc34me]

After reading through lots of topics, I see it happening to many sites. All I know to do is to try changing some things, description, keywords, and a few more things, sit and wait.
thanks

[twebdonny]

You will be waiting a long time if you hope to have any penalty removed. Never happens, no matter what some others may tell you. It just doesn't unless it was a technical glitch on Yahoo's part and not a penalty. You can pay, you can write, it's just a big waste of time. Better to just open a new domain. Yahoo Mike and Tim used to show up early on, when they were looking for customers and money, now you rarely see them. Writing Yahoo only results in those form letters.

[bbonline]

I think Yahoo should start reading threads like this one to see what they really need to change.

1. Prevent fraudulent mirrors from pushing original websites into penalty.
2. Help webmasters that have been penalized to improve their websites for them to be back into search results.
3. Start answering questions sent to them.
4. Make Site Match worth using.