Site no longer on Yahoo

site no longer appears within Yahoo serps

[dont_get_it]

My site, on the net since 1997, has long been a top performer in virtually all search engines for our targeted keyword phrases- without the use of any questionable tactics.

About 6-months ago, our site literally disappeared from Yahoo search results pages. I have attempted to contact Yahoo's Help(?) staff for assistance, however I simply receive a canned response suggesting that we consider paid listings to improve our positioning. The trouble is, even searches for exact phrases on our site do not return our page, despite several other sites that simply forward to our site appearing in the results.

Any advise? My most recent communication to the Yahoo Support staff is below:

--paste--

Hi.

It has been over a month since I last inquired about our site not displaying in Yahoo search results, and as suggested, I waited to see if the problem was a result of the site accidentally being omitted from the index.

Of the 4 possible causes suggested at the time, the results of our findings are:

>1. Sometimes a site is indexed but is not showing up in search...

We have verified that our site has been indexed by doing a site specific search, although a very small number of pages on our site appear to be indexed. On searches for the title and an identifiable unique phrase that appears on our site, other sites that in turn automatically forward the user to our site do appear, however our own site is still excluded. In addition, sub-domains of our site, such as our online support area at http://support.domain.com and our online message board at http://msgboard.domain.com do appear, however our primary site http://www.domain.com is excluded from results.

>2. The site may have been dropped temporarily...

We have verified uptime for our website, and only minimal changes have been made to pages within the site (e.g. no structural changes). Also, we have verified that the Yahoo! Slurp spider is visiting our site regularly, with over 300 visits during a 2-week period from Sept. 30 through Oct. 14, 2004.

>3. We may have made an error that caused the site to be dropped accidentally...

This problem has now existed for several months. eliminating this possibility.

>4. Your page may no longer conform to our Index Guidelines...

We have verified all aspects of our site and cannot identify any guidelines not being adhered to, with the possible exception of using cascading style sheets to modify how text is displayed on the pages (possible violation of "Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees"?). I don't believe that this would be cause to omit our site, as the use of style sheets is not limited to our main website (e.g. we also use it on our support.domain.com site that continues to be displayed), and is standard practice for the majority of professional websites, including Yahoo!.

I would appreciate any advise or further information that might assist us in having our site returned to the index. As stated before, it seems fairly evident that a filter is being applied that is excluding content from http://www.domain.com, regardless of the search term and despite the pages being indexed.

[surfgatinho]

Can you find your home page in the SERPS - if you look way down?
Or is it completely gone?

What's happened to me is I'm not coming up on any searches because all my top ranking pages seem to have gone.
When I looked about 8 pages down from where I expected to be I found my home page. Strangely when I clicked "similar pages" it came up with over 200 pages from my site.

To me this seems like a penalty as I am now ranking behind completely irrelevant sites. Strange thing is I haven't changed anything significant recently.

[dont_get_it]

We seem to have been removed entirely, as opposed to simply losing positions. The only way that I can find any of the site's pages is to do a site specific search.

[willie50]

My site too has gone from the yahoo search, it happened at the end of July, just recently only my index is back, I have sent emails to yahoo and they said that my site does not comply with the Content Policy Guidelines, (even though my site has been in all search engines since 2000 with no problems, no spam, no nothing).

My index does not get any searches from yahoo and my other 200 pages are nowhere to be seen, yahoo does the slurp for the robot txt file and after goes to my index with index/; and a 404 error comes up or page not found, do you also get the ; in your logs? and if you do, do you know what it is?.

I wish you the best, and the only way is to ask yahoo for a site re-review, and be lucky enough that they say "your site is OK"

willie50

[Panacea]

It quite simple. Yahoo has purposely attached a penalty against your site causing it to be removed from the index. You are guilty of naturally ranking too high for a money making keyword slot and not being a Site Match customer. If you want to get your site back into Yahoo you need to sign-up with Site Match and start paying for your traffic. This is Yahoo's dirty little secret.

[cleanup]

Anyone searching using Yahoo! these days is only seeing a fraction of the internet.

Only a matter of time before people figure it out and go elsewhere.

[Crow187]

I notice usually fractions of my sites are showing at a time. Seems Y is rotating between different parts of the site at times, some days my good keywords are up, some days i'm nowhere to be found. When i search for my url i usually only get about 5 or 6 pages, out of maybe 200.