Yahoo indexing only home page

is this some kind of penalty

[sdani]

I have read that on google, if only home page is listed, then it may be because of poor page rank or it may be because of penalty.

Does the same apply to yahoo too? If only home page is listed under site:mysite.com command.. then can this be any type of penalty?

Thanks
SDani

[kodaks]

I have never heard that about google... where did you read that?

[Marcia]

>>If only home page is listed under site:mysite.com command.. then can this be any type of penalty?

Nope, not unless there's a reason for a penalty. I've had a "coming soon" page up on a site that Google's been all over this past week, with only the original *nothing* page in Yahoo - no penalty, there's no reason for one.

It can easily mean that the rest of the site hasn't been indexed yet, but you'll have to see whether it's been crawled. And make sure nothing's hindering it - like only JS navigation, or possibly improperly done frames or dynamic URLs that aren't Yahoo friendly.

Don't automatically assume a penalty. And the way Google does things doesn't really relate much to how Yahoo does things. If Google has the homepage of a site, once you make changes and put up more pages, if there's even one link from a page that gets fresh-crawled, Googlebot will eat it up like chocolate candy - with the revised page in the cache within just a couple of days' time. Not so Yahoo.

If it's a brand new site it may just take time, though it still pays to check out any possible hindrances and make sure there are inbound links from sites already in their index.

[edited by: Marcia at 2:00 am (utc) on July 23, 2004]

[sdani]

In Google forum, I had posted that my home page has white bar.. (0 page rank), and some people suggested that it may be expired domain penalty.. some suggested some other type of panelty.
But my logs are evident of this.. Google only comes to robots.txt and my home page.. no other page. and only my home page is listed in index.

[sdani]

Marcia, there is no Java Script.. MSN has listed my one and only second level page, which is linked on home page (actually I have three links on home page but other two have meta tag noindex).
I was seeing similar behaviour, (index page only) on google and yahoo.. so I enabled Cache few days ago (it was turned off (nocache)).. and I removed the only other variable .. i.e. completely removed my robots.txt.

The site is an year old.. and it had yahoo directory link from day one. In past two months, I have aquired about 150-160 links by spending on pay per click and informing users about the existence that way.

Lets see if that helps in improving the ranking in next updates.

Thanks
SDani

[Marcia]

sdani, I haven't seen your post in the Google forum, but if it's been up for a year that's a different story than a brand new site. You might want to check on the history of the site with the Wayback Machine.

And run your robots.txt through the validator just to be sure - that's always worth double-checking.

[ddogg]

Yahoo is just really terrible at crawling sites. Well, at least my sites ;-)

[jive01]

I have one site that's been up 6 months. Perfectly crawled by Google. Yahoo bot made a mess of it by ignoring page titles (displaying the URL as the titles of pages instead of the title tags). The site's pages could only be found using site:http://domainhere as opposed to site:domainhere.

Yahoo appear to have stopped this quirk, now not returning results for site:http:

The site is now back to the home page indexed only (if in fact the other pages were 'indexed' before). Maybe the Yahoo bot will return one day. Yahoo definitely needs to improve in this area - unless of course they are deliberately tardy in crawling sites to encourage SiteMatch participation.

The site supposedly had no penalty - Yahoo confirmed this. At least Yahoo did reply to my 'feedback'. Tick tock, tick tock...