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I have four travel sites, well established and leaders in my chosen travel area. All figure very well on Google and until the changeover on yahoo! too.
When Y! changed to their own search engine three of my sites went missing and one stayed. The one that stayed had no interlinking and was on a free server, it ranks reasonably well. The site was one of the first I ever set up and I had notreally optimised well.
The other three related and interlinked sites were all gone. The sites were not spammy and had original content on all three but interlinking was probably the cause.
Of course I sent mails to Yahoo! and read extensively the boards for clues etc to try to understand the penalty criteria and more importantly if these penalties are automated or by hand. No reply ever from Yahoo!.
Anyway, after about two months one of the sites suddenly popped up in the number one position on yahoo! for all of its keywords.
I still do not know why, but what is really puzzling me is that of the three optimised and interlinked sites that were penalized originally why should one suddenly pop back in there at number 1! They all used more or less the same design and have existed for five years or more. They are also all listed in the Yahoo! directory.
I have not seen or read anything to convince me that Yahoo! uses exclusivley automated or hand editing so I guess it must be both which makes things complicated.
One of the sites still banned has some really good original content not related to the other two and I feel I have waited long enough to ensure that it will not be reincluded in Yahoo! so I have decided to make a clean start with a new domain.
I am thinking of just registering the .net version. Perhaps that is too naive and should I change to something completley different?
Anyway for what its worth these are the only sure facts I have to offer anyone stuggling to figure out the new Yahoo! search.
Anyone else trying to understand Yahoo!...?
Yahoo isn't using Inktomi; their search is entirely new from the ground up. According to the interview Mike Grehan did with a Yahoo spokesman, they took on the best features of what they had acquired, but Yahoo Search itself is new according to the company. They've said so on numerous occasions.
Here we have it right here in this forum, from Tim in msg #3
Yahoo is using a new search technology which is not Inktomi.
[webmasterworld.com...]
It had lots of pages that were sort of repetitive, affiliate and adsense links, keyword targeted articles, etc. The site was a year old and made money and I didn't change much.
I think that when i started targeting keyword misspellings and adding more pages (cheap airfair etc) is when they finally dropped me from the index.
Oh well, time for a new site with better content ...
There are just a few of my thoughts on IF yahoo was trying to ban competition why all competetion never went on day 1. Its all still all just a conspiracy theory but not cannot be dismissed as totaly implausable.
Marcia
Theres a clear contradiction within your post:
their search is entirely new from the ground up.
they took on the best features of what they had acquired,
I believe Tim was trying to say that Yahoo isnt Inktomi, which of course it isnt. And new technology as in a step forward, i do not read that as saying theres no inherited INK tech within the current yahoo tech.
It still bears a striking resemblance to Ink, but I'll take Tim's and the other gentleman's word for it that it isn't.
Do you know exactly when Yahoo began using Inktomi?
My answer showed that Yahoo acquired Inktomi long before introducing their own technolgy in Feb 2004 as indeed was posted in the "Submission to the new Yahoo"
thread.
I reckon that a lot of time hypotheses proposed about bans and penalties coinciding with purported algo changes etc are leading the SEO community up blind alleys.
Trying to figure out the reasons for penalties resulting in either drops in ranking and/or a ban is always going to be a matter for speculation due to the degree of secrecy and mystification surrounding algorithms and lack of specific reasons for particular sites being penalised.
For example we were told that our site was banned for being deemed part of a link farm. But we are still pretty much in the dark because we were given no explanation of which parts of the site this applies to or any detailed definition of what Yahoo! sees as constituting a link farm...
It is futile to analyse any changes made to the site just prior to dissappearing as the ban would appear to be due to the new Yahoo algo.
The point I want to make is that it is more often than not bad logic to conclude that because two events occur at the same time that they are therefore causally connected. For example our ban could be a manual penalty not an automated result of the new technology..
Does anyone have any evidence as to bans being manually applied or automated?
Does anyone have any evidence as to bans being manually applied or automated?
what do you think happens with site match submissions? The simple answer to the above is yes to both. In actual fact taking your question at face value then all search engines do both, the point is the scale of culling and the reasons behind them, whether automated or not that is the point here. Actually i wasnt aware there was even a debate as to whether Yahoo manually banned sites i thought it was a given.
How did you get Yahoo to respond and tell you why your site was banned? All I got was one sentence saying that my "site's treatment was appropriate".
And for the record, I never optimized my site for any search engine. I had no inbound links and no reciprocal links. Because my site is made up of biographies, it naturally is keyword rich and gets good rankings. Occasionally, Google goes weird on me and lowers my ranking for a month, but I never make any changes and it always goes back up the following month. Several webmasters who have seen my site, can also find no reason for it to be banned.
Oh well, their ban has forced me to go back to work and I start a great job on Monday, so this has turned into a good thing for me. But...I will always be convinced that Yahoo is operating on an unethical basis.
No inbound links = PR0. Are you saying you've been ranking for search terms at Google with absolutely no PR or inbound links?
Yahoo also looks at inbound links - every search engine does. And did the people checking out your sites also check out who you were linking out to?
did you become a Yahoo editor?
:-)
I came here for help, not a fight. The past two months have been very scary for me, getting my traffic cut like that.
I should have said I have *Practically* no inbound links. I have 1 major one : dmoz and like 3 from small personal sites. The home page only has a PR4 and the rest PR3. The music biz is competitive, it's not like you want to link to another site so that your visitors buy their music and other paraphernalia at another site, when you could have kept them on your site and got the sale.
As I stated in my original post, In addition to bios, every page has band discographies. Visitors can buy CDs etc by clicking a cd title or book title etc. Yahoo Launch and every other music site does the same thing, so I cannot see how that would be a quality issue.
Soapystar -lmao at the editor comment.
Take Care Everyone :)
Help can be digging to find the reason for not ranking; in fact it often is. Having an ODP listing and only 3 links from personal pages sounds like it's far too little to compete in a competitive market. Check out the competition that's ranking well for competitive terms and see what they've got.
Don't give up on the site; go ahead and get more inbound links. The point is, that if you have only that few links it could well be a problem all around. Algos change, and link pop is always a factor. Hunt for some other related directories and sites that are on topic - or even decent links that aren't on topic. That could help out, and can be done in spare time. And don't forget that good outbound links on a site can help with rankings.
>>Does anyone have any evidence as to bans being manually applied or automated?
Yes, I've seen it happen fast enough where it has to be manual.
The discussion covers many of the features of the new Yahoo! - of especial interest to this thread are the sections where they discuss "de-aliasing" and affiliate sites. Basically they aim to weed out sites with duplicate content - very common in the travel sector - in the name of relevancy and best user experience.
He explains
"de-aliasing in reference to knowing that something such as www.coke.com and www.coca-cola.com are the same content. If Yahoo! were to show both URL's following a search on "coke" then the user wouldn't be getting the diversity of results which would be optimal."
On what constitutes spam Glick states
"there isn't an exhaustive list. There are new technologies coming out all of the time. At the highest, or fundamental level, someone who is doing something for the intent of distorting search results to users... that's pretty much the over arching view of what would be considered a violation of our content policies."
He does mention some specific tactics as spammy, these include massively interlinked domains, keyword stuffing, hanging out in bad neighbourhoods and certain types of cloaking,
I just love this conclusion:
"the issue of: "I'm number one for this keyword"... may not exist at all in a few years. You know, you'll be number one for that keyword depending on who types it in! And from where and on what day... and... It is going to get more complex than something that can simply be summed up in a ranking algorithm, let alone how many checks somebody has on a toolbar."
All in all this adds considerably to the challenge of optimising travel sites for natural search results. Glick describes the treatment of affiliates/ duplicate content thus:
"what does a site bring to the table? Is there some unique information here? Or is the sole purpose of that site to transact on another site, so that someone can get a commission... if that's the case, we'd rather put them directly in the store ourselves, than send them to someone else who's simply telling them how to get to the store."
So operating as a "travel agent" would seem to mean a site will not be able to get listed in the Yahoo! natural search results as Yahoo! want to take the users directly to the hotels, restaurants etc.
If Yahoo enforces this so that eventually they themselves will become the only online intermediary between searchers and travel related businesses can they survive as a player in ther natural search battlefield?
681,000 travel page links alone.
If the latter, why would Yahoo look at it from Google's users point of view?
In the same interview Glick points out that it is a weakness that Google does not "de-alias" to filter out duplicate content...
de-aliasing in reference to knowing that something such as www.coke.com and www.coca-cola.com are the same content. If Yahoo! were to show both URL's following a search on 'coke' then the user wouldn't be getting the diversity of results which would be optimal. He's also happy to point out that a search for 'coke' at Google is representative of the problem!
The bottom line is does Yahoo gives a better, more relevent user experience since the change to their new search technology?
and growing...don't forget that!
If Yahoo followed their own "High and Mighty approach"
maybe so many webmasters wouldn't be so disgusted, but
they don't. Plain and simple...they don't!
And for the comment on Yahoo building features into
their search "technology", is that what you are calling
the old worn out Inktomi algorithm now? I don't see
late great "search technology" in play here by any stretch
of the imagination.
too bad, he didn't know of the ~coke query.
That would be a more diverse opinion of the word coke. ;)
Soapy, do you mean Yahoo flood their own natural search results with 681,000 travel page links or the Google results?
If the latter, why would Yahoo look at it from Google's users point of view?
i mean yahoo have their optimised pages that lead to somebody elses shop in huge numbers in the Google index. Yes this would seem contradictory to their stand on what the user deserves.
Have you filled out Google reports about such activity?
What do you mean by doctored meta tags?
I just see Yahoo as another competitor to beat out, which I do in Google. But what Yahoo is doing is purely a spamming technique which I back off from. It seems they feel the quantity of spam will get people to shift to Yahoo.
And I've never been totally convinced that there isn't some kind of immunity threshhold, where sites beyond a certain amount of PR have an automatic immunity from penalties. I have absolutely no tangible proof of this, mind you, but if any sites beyond PR8 have ever been penalized I'd like to know which ones they were.
but if any sites beyond PR8 have ever been penalized I'd like to know which ones they were.
searchking springs to mind..:-)
ooops you said beyond, sorry...so do you mean pr9 and pr10 sites?
Does anyone have any evidence as to bans being manually applied or automated?
an old yahoo_mike post just came back to me. Tried to find it but it may be one the many no longer around. Anyway the thread was asking about how bans were implemenetd and his reply was as far as i recall:
we would hope to automate the whole process in the future but its not possible right now.
pretty conclusive!
