Something Definitely Up With Yahoo Dropping Pages

yahoo index missing pages

[jcbereznay]

I just ran a search engine saturation test on marketleap.com this morning for one of my big sites (40,000+ pages) that has completely dropped from the Y! index. It appears, some of my largest competitors (and sites much larger than mine) are also showing little to no pages in Yahoo, Altavista, etc. I think MSN is also affected which tells me this could be an Ink thing. Any comments? Anyone else seeing similar results?

[wiskid]

I have definitely seen the same thing on several sites that I monitor. In each case all but two listings of the home page are gone, yes all that is left is the home page TWO times.

[Tim_S]

In the course of about 1 month my website went from having (according to MarkeLeap) 7,000 pages in their index - up to 13,500 pages in their index - and in the past 2 weeks have dropped all but about 1,300 pages.
Any ideas or speculation as to why Yahoo is dropping so many pages?

TimS

[daja_vu]

Welcome aboard to all kicked off by Y :(

[reuben101]

Were you guys running Adsense on these sites? Just wondering due to an ongoing conversation with 2 design clients that believe they were recently dropped from Y after adding Adsense to their sites. I don't buy it but I haven't been able to talk them out of the idea. They have some interesting points, but I thought the dual db theory might explain it.

[wiskid]

I do not have any AdSense on any of the sites that had all the sub pages knocked out.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that even some of the pages that are paid-for-inclusion in the Inktomi database tech are nowhere to be found Yahoo. Which I think is very strange :(

[codegreen]

I'm seeing the same problem starting last night - my biggest site (still a relatively small one) had basically all first page yahoo listings including many #1s for the past 12 months has suddenly dissappeared from the SERPS completely.

Good backlinks, no shady stuff at all, steady growth in listings over the past 6 months, then suddenly dropped.

Is there any way to tell if a domain is banned, and if so why? This is killing me!

[codegreen]

By the way - no adsense on my site.

[Tim_S]

Interesting that you ask. I've been running Adsense on the site for over a year - on 11/10/04 I removed Adsense - and on 12/08/04 it was put back.

Here's MarketLeap's Yahoo indexed pages for my site at a couple points around the above time frame:

10/20 - 9,000
11/05 - 10,000
11/10 - removed Adsense coincidentally
11/12 - 12,100
11/16 - 9,500
11/21 - 2,200
12/08 - replaced Adsense coincidentally
(today) 12/15 - 1,160

That's a pretty clear indication to me that Yahoo's adding and dropping of thousands of our pages had little to do with the presense of Adsense :)

Anyone have any thoughts why Yahoo would be dropping thousands of pages that were previously indexed?

TimS

[RoySpencer]

..obviously they are making room for OUR pages...we went from about 100 to 17,000 indexed today.

[Tim_S]

That's awesome :)

I have a suspicion that they are just doing some serious house cleaning before doing a monumental crawl. It's based on absolutely nothing other than a gut feeling and a little wishful thinking ;)

TimS

[helenp]

I donīt know but seems to be some general cut.........I have only 100 from previous 300 pages in.

[Crow187]

Seems like they updated again too, doesn't look like they fixed the situation either, we have loads of pages missing as well.

Another crappy update by Y!

[Kirby]

A month to the day after Tim said sites affected by redirects should be returning withing 30 days, my site came back today.

I feel for the rest of you. I got booted 2 weeks after Y! dropped Google and made the switch - so I know your frustration.

[codegreen]

good to hear that _someone_ has been dropped and then returned as promised.

I hope they can do something for me. :(

[lizardx]

Same here, see a big drop this week in pages, already didn't index all the new pages we added, crawled them fast, but not in site page count, and now that count dropped by a factor of ten.

I think yahoo has the same problem that google has, it's full. Some of the recent messups I've seen at yahoo definitely suggest they are working on something, a while back suddenly they were delivering old indexed stuff for a few days, then it came back. Like they tested something, it totally messed up, they popped in an old index for a few days until they debugged it. Must be hard working on this stuff, big difference between lab testing and real world runs.

[frontpage]

My website that has been online since 2001 has disappeared from Yahoo as well.

We are a reference website, with a forum, and directory.

We are listed in ODP and Google and we have 6000 backlinks.

Now, Poof!

We don't sell anything, don't optimize, spam, or otherwise do anything to improve our ranking.

Google and MSN loves but Yahoo doesn't ... go figure.

[Go60Guy]

I just had a major site show up with all but two pages gone. This is a site that's been around for about two years. Talk about frustration.

[esllou]

I have two homepage listings on Y but thousands of other pages from my education site gone into the ether.

Doesn't seem to have changed with the current update either.

Have adsense on both though that doesn't seem relevant from others posting here.

[mgeyman]

I run a regional directory that was #1 for a number of key phrases for a number of years and the site's index page disappeared last month. This is discouraging! Gee, I hope they aren't trying to coerce us into their Site Match program!

[hunkydory]

I have an affiliate site that has been ranking very well on several keywords for over a year now and all of a sudden it no longer appears anywhere in the Yahoo searches at all.
I haven't made any major changes to the site recently and have now uploaded an older version of the index page from before this all happened but still no joy.
None of the pages seem to be listed, even if i enter a search for the site name.

Is there anyway at all to find out if a penalty has been placed on my site for some reason as this is costing us loads in lost revenue?

[twebdonny]

Competition, Yahoo hates competition. If your site in any way competes with Yahoo for product sales, get ready to say buh bye to it's ranking.

[mgeyman]

You can also say "bye-bye" to relavance and credibility. If Yahoo is dismissing/sacrificing good quality sites because they are competitive - that just doesn't cut it with me. I list competitive sites in my directory. I don't care how many billions of dollars of revenue they generate - they lost their credibility in my book if that is truly the case!

[mgeyman]

My site is back in the Yahoo Web Search results for given key phrases like it was prior to November 24th - a month to the day when it was not showing up at all for those same key phrases. I'm happy now! Interesting! Are they doing monthly updates to their index?

[Edge]

Yahoo search just isn't right, I searched "training Directory" and got two pages of results from the same website.

[helenp]

<<Yahoo search just isn't right, I searched "training Directory" and got two pages of results from the same website. >>

Maybe you have some spyware?
I did the same search and got all diferen sites.

[zeus]

I have noticed that those sites that only have there index page listed in Yahoo.com, have payed sometime for a listing in inktomi and now they are not paying anymore, then only the index page is shown and the rest of the site is missing, what a scam.

[Tim_S]

I once paid Inktomi for some service but haven't in years - yet Yahoo still lists almost 1,200 pages for my site. About a month or so ago they had 13,000 pages listed. If it was as simple as no longer paying for a service, I could understand...but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Weird.

TimS

[zeus]

Tim_s - Its just that I got 6 sites and 2 of them are paid for 1-1,5 year ago and only them has this index only problem and other I have talked with the same problem.