Removed from the index

Please share your experience

[Noximus]

Hi All,
My site had very good positions at Yahoo. The site is quite old (about four years) and the design was old too. I decided to make new design of the first page. I did it and in three days I found that the index page is removed from the index. Also 80% of internal pages are removed. I of coarse uploaded the old version of the site.
How do you think am I banned from yahoo? Do I have the chance of getting in again? What should I do else for getting the old positions? If the bot checks and finds that the sites is the same will I get in the index?
Dear friends,
In advance thank you for any comments.

Noximus

[walkman]

usually Yahoo is for life...unless you email them

[twebdonny]

yes, eamil them and you get the stupid form letter
about reasons for removal...they don't even follow their
own guidelines...look at travel.y. , it's all about stifling non paid competition.

[twebdonny]

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,360,000 from yahoo.com for travel.yahoo. (0.33 seconds)

EOM...

[soapystar]

is the site an affiliate site and what sector is it in?

[randle]

The real challenge is they will not tell you what the issue is, thus you are left to try and figure that out on your own. Go through it with a fine tooth comb looking for anything they may not like.

With Yahoo generally the trouble lies in linking, i.e. a preponderance of interlinking for the sites you have listed on your "links" pages.

First thing to do is e-mail them and ask for the site to be reviewed, you need to be sure you have in fact been penalized. It's possible it could be something else all together.

Good luck, if you are penalized it will be up to human editors to let you back in.

[twebdonny]

They can always find a reason they don't like your site, no matter how minute that may be if they want you penalized or out of the index.

[Noximus]

Hi All,
I've got my site in the index again!
Just First page, but it is the first step I think.

[8cool]

Noximus,

My site was deleted from Y! and home page was re-indexed 3 weeks before.

But its still only the home page :(

[Noximus]

I think soon Yahoo will re-index whole site.
I don't think that the bot will stop on the home page.

[Kennyh]

I hope you're right Noximus. I'm in exactly the same position as you. Whole site fell out of Yahoo! on Nov 5, then index page re-appeared a week later. Still only the index page, but I can't se any reason why the rest won't be back sooner or later.

[willie50]

Since the end of July I had 2 sites dissapear from Yahoo, in November only the index of both reapeared, and ofcourse, no clicks from yahoo, I am desperate for yahoo to go back to normal, my income has gone down by 95% and I don't know how much longer I can hold on, before I get back into a 9 to 5 job.
My sites had been in yahoo since the year 2000 and through hard work (18 hours a day every day) I was in some good position for some keywords, the sites that have taken over #1 spot, most of them are really useless for the consumer or someone looking for information on some subject.

There's is thousands of conflicting reasoning for the why thousands of good web sites have dissapeared from yahoo, I don't have any idea myself, only the believe (and hope) that yahoo slurp is broken and nobody knows how to fix it.

Good luck all

willie50

[walkman]

cross linking is 95% of the reasons people think they've been banned for...that's what I got from reading in the past year here and other boards.

[surfgatinho]

One of my sites has been dropped except for the index page. That was about a month ago.
I'd be worried if it had made any difference. Overall visits aren't down that much - I think even the general public are beginning to realise Yahoo isn't so good.

I don't get the issue with cross linking. If I run a site that is concerned with UK widgets and another that is concerned with USA widgets why shouldn't I cross link. This is not detremental to the user so what is the motive for penalising such sites.
Also, only one of my sites have been dumped, ironically the oldest and most successful.

Can someone give me a definition of what is meant by cross-linking.

Another thing I read recently is Yahoo have been working on a duplicate filter. Anybody heard anything abouth this?

[soapystar]

I don't get the issue with cross linking. If I run a site that is concerned with UK widgets and another that is concerned with USA widgets why shouldn't I cross link.

correct. Only if you were looking for excuses to remove competition would you ban a site for this. Search engines only concerned with a fair algo simply ignore the benefit it gives to ranking. Of course if you simply were not up to speck technically then you may choose to ban rather than allow to gain benefit. However, it clearly has many legitimate reasons to be used.

[ichthyous]

I still have around 800 pages in the index, down from 1800. My Yahoo traffic has vanished almost entirely though. Theoretically, if I have half the pages I should still have half the traffic, but that is not at all the case. Slurp has also stopped visiting my site entirely. Has anyone else seen this?

[ichthyous]

The keywords for my site weren't really that much in demand so I'm not sure if it's the case with me. How do you even know if you've been banned? My home page and around 800 content pages still appear in the index, but there is practically no traffic. So far this month I have seen 300 visitors from yahoo, which is down about 90% from it's October high. I don't know why they would ban me as my site has been the same for three years now, no new tricks. So how do you know for sure if you have been banned?

[oigeez2003]

I just don't think Yahoo is banning people for cross linking or spam at the level we may think. My entire category has been almost entirely overtaken my 2 companies that use techniques that are so spammy that they'd be laughable if they didn't work.

One guy's got 2 sites where every page links not only to itself but to the other site using a series of over 48 keyword stuffed URL text links at the bottom of every page. Then under that he has over half a page of hidden text, including variations on the keywords in sets of 20 all the way down the page - all hidden of course. The other has multiple doorway pages all with keyword stuffed URLS. Between the 2 of them they take up almost all of the first and second pages despite the fact that there are a slew of better competitors. This is all Illegal SEO 101 and yet they've gotten away with it for over 2 years.

I've pointed this out to a Yahoo customer care person as well as someone at Overture and nobody cares (althought they were shocked when they saw the source code). They've lost tens of thousands of dollars because many of us stopped advertising or using SiteMatch simply because there is no way to compete against these spammy techniques.

[ichthyous]

Perhaps Noximus was right about yahoo re-indexing from scratch. I haven't seen Slurp on my site for a month but since Friday it's been grabbing every page I have. This is a good sign (I hope)...

[Noximus]

Hi,
Kennyh, ichthyous,
have your sites returned to the old places?
How many your pages are in the index?
I'm in the same situation, just the homepage is in the Yahoo index and no old places.
What about you?

[ichthyous]

Nope, my pages continue to drop from 1600 down to 800 and now down to 500. My traffic from Yahoo has totally vanished, even with 500 pages remaining indexed.

[andyll]

On about 12/15 yahoo & msn dropped all pages from one of my sites except for the index.htm. (previously had 1000s indexed)

Perhaps it was related to 2 of my pure content sites all of a sudden jumping onto the 1st page of the serp results on both search engines.

Or it might be related to my site being down for a most of a day around that time.

Since then pages have slowly started to come back. Msn showed a high of 2000+ today but right now is down to 4. Yahoo showed ~220 today (back down to 22 at last glance)

It doesn't seem to be a ban since the pages are coming back and the number of pages in the index seems to be really jumping around.

[worldzworld]

This happened to many of my sites as well. I had a lot of listings for each of my sites, then one day, all of the listings disappeared. At first I thought I was penalized, but found the following:

My hosting accounts use cpanel. In the cpanel there is an ip deny manager feature. I looked at the ip deny manager page, and someone had set the ipdeny to "deny all". This effectively denied slurp from accessing my server. Because slurp could not visit my server, slurp came to the conclusion that the pages and domain no longer were live, and my domain and listings were removed from the index automatically.

After fixing the ipdeny and removing the "deny all" setting, slurp was able to come back and spider my sites. Only the index pages have returned on yahoo thus far.

After reviewing my logs, it seems that slurp is not going any deeper than the index page even though my index links to other pages on my site, includng the sitemap.

Here is a snippet of my logs from the last slurp visit.

66.196.90.139 - - [xx/Dec/2004:18:21:34 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 302 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]
66.196.90.139 - - [xx/Dec/2004:18:21:34 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 9463 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]
66.196.90.188 - - [xx/Dec/2004:18:21:43 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]

Notice that there were 3 visits. First visit goes for the robots.txt . Second visit immediately gets the index page. Third visit comes from a different ip address and there is a code 304 (not modified). It stops at the index page and goes no further.

On another domain that was affected by the ip deny manager hacker... my log shows the following:

66.196.72.193 - - [xx/Dec/2004:08:21:26 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 302 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]
66.196.72.193 - - [xx/Dec/2004:08:21:27 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 9564 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]
66.196.92.74 - - [xx/Dec/2004:08:21:27 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 9564 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]

Basically the same thing happened here. First visit goes for the robots.txt, second visit pulls the index page, third visit from a different ip address that pulls the index page.

Again, it stops at the index page and goes no further.

Who ever hacked into my server and got in my cpanel sure did a number on me and basically ruined my businesses.

If you have a cpanel for your hosting accounts, I suggest you log in and check the ip deny feature and see if the setting has been modified to "deny all". If so, that is the reason your listings disappeared from yahoo... and not because your site was penalized.

As I find out more info, I will share it.

If you find out that your cpanel was hacked too and that the ip deny feature was set to "deny all", please make a post here and let me know. It will verify that the info I shared is valid.

Note: My other domains with cpanels that were not hacked continue to have yahoo listings. Only the domains I have where the ip deny manager setting was set to "deny all" lost all listings on yahoo.

[Noximus]

Thanks worldzworld for the post,
but in my case I don't think that this is the reason. I've several sites hosted at the same hosting company, but some of them are well placed at Yahoo and all the pages are indexed but some are in a very poor situation, Yahoo has indexed just the first page.

[mifi601]

noximus - I guess you are talking about Y search not the directory?

because, as was mentioned earlier Y is in my experience for life - it is sometimes hard to get a site removed ...

[Noximus]

Yes, We are speaking about Yahoo search

[randle]

Whats interesting about being removed from Yahoo is that now when you e-mail them asking for re-inclusion you get a canned e-mail message telling you;

“To see if your site or page is listed in the Yahoo! Search Index, enter an identifiable phrase (5-10 words) in quotes, that matches the title or text on the web page you are looking for into the Yahoo! Search box located here [search.yahoo.com...] If your site appears in the results, it's listed in the Yahoo! Search Index, and you don't need to complete a feedback form as your request will not be processed.”

So I do this and check on a few sites that I know were removed from the start when they switched over from Google. (we still have absolutely no idea why they were removed, but thats another story) I copy the title of the site, as they suggest, and lo and behold there is the site. I then check the results and cannot find the sites for their main key words in the first 1,000 results. I Gave up after that many.

So, what to do now; the sites in, but clearly there is a penalty applied. At least befor you could beg for re-inclusion, now what can you say? “I don’t like my placement?” . Guess they solved the, "my sites been removed" problem.

I like Yahoo, just wish I could get more of my sites back in!

Anyone else with this experience?

[soapystar]

when the new yahoo first hit the early talk was of a demotion penalty. The focus them moved to total bans. It does look like they have switched the line from total ban to total demotion once again, amounts to the same thing but as you point out it stops you asking for reindexing.

[treeline]

it stops you asking for reindexing.

It also prevents lawsuits over exclusion. The whole ranking process is subjective to some extent, now you are subjectively the lowest. Someone has to be lowest, so there's nothing to sue over.

[soapystar]

hum...not sure about that..theres a huge difference between natural serps and applied penalties, if you can show your position is due to a demotion affect rather than natural serps it amounts to the same thing as a ban...it just adds an extra layer of haze....