Dead URL in top 10 yahoo search?!

[teletrnr]

Three years ago we killed a duplicate URL pointing to our website to avoid any SE penalties and prevent customer confusion. We did all the proper redirects, etc. and have only registered the URL since then. All of our efforts paid off beautifully and this URL had completely vanished in all directories and se's...until now.

Starting today we are getting referrals from yahoo in our logs. Out of curiosity, I searched for the very competitive niche keywords in yahoo...and there it was ranked at #7 with an ancient description!

The funny thing is, our current URL had vanished from yahoo search like so many others without a trace, yet it is heavily spidered every day. I figured that our main problem was just waiting for the index to be refreshed, but yahoo is instead resurrecting the dead?!

Any ideas on what might be happening and what this could mean for the relevancy and freshness of yahoo search?

teletrnr

[cgrantski]

Just a comment. This is appalling. It's now three days later - can you tell us if this is still happening?

[teletrnr]

After many days, this URL has actually improved in rankings. Although I'm not at all impressed with yahoo freshness, it is nice to have traffic from an extinct URL. Again, the last time this URL appeared in any search was almost 3 years ago. If it is still listed in some obscure directory, I've had a hard time finding it.

Makes you wonder where yahoo is really getting all its information.

teletrnr

[internetheaven]

We have hundreds of URLs that were deleted between 1-14 months ago that Yahoo is still ranking in its results.

The older ones such as the one that was deleted 14 months ago still has links to it around the web from when it existed so maybe Yahoobot just "believes" it's there with all its heart and hopes it will return.