Changing Domains To Be Re-included In Yahoo

Good or bad move? Pros and Cons.

[knoir]

Hello everybody. I have a big problem on my shoulders.

Ever since August of 2004, my site was dropped from yahoo. Till this day, I do not know what I did to be treated like this. I have always followed the rules and i've always been very prudent when it came to the search engines.

I have contacted yahoo on numerous occasions. I switched hosting companies, re-designed my site. I have tried everything. They seem to not care one bit. Every time I send a email, I get this stupid generic response that does not reveal any information on my problem.

Today, I came up with the idea of transferring my files to a new domain. I figured that yahoo has me banned based on my domain, if i switch domains, I should appear in yahoo again.

My plan to get a new hosting account and domain, transfer files from the old domain to the new domain, the directory and file structure will remain the same. After the move has been made, i will keep the old domain and hosting up for a few months with a 301 redirect in the .htaccess.

Here are my tough questions:

1. What is going to happen with all the backlinks i have acquired over the past 3 years?

2. Will I lose rankings in the search engines? I currently have good rankings in google for very competitive terms.

3. How do I go about avoiding a content duplication ban between the old and new domain. Should I erase every from the old domain and simply keep the .htaccess file for the search engine spiders?

4. Should block all search engines from indexing the old site and do a 301 redirect to the new site?

5. Do you think that this could work?

I would really appreciate all inputs. This is a very important task for me. Yahoo is driving me crazy. I hope to hear from you all.

[knoir]

anybody?

[soapystar]

this has been covered in past threads... you might wanna do a search

[martinibuster]

...if i switch domains, I should appear in yahoo again.

Some people have claimed to have regained their rankings with the same content on a different domain. Whether Yahoo caught them again isn't really known, as sometimes people don't follow up on subsequent progress or lack thereof.

For instance, I recall one person posted a certain technique for doing well on Google, and a lot of posters on WebmasterWorld congratulated him for being so clever and assured him that this couldn't possibly be considered spam. Well (I found out months later in conversation with him), that he got banned- and never posted it.

Over the years there have been a lot of "tricks" for popping oneself out of a banned state, like banning the bots for a month then removing the ban, etc.

I think before you do anything, it might be helpful to correctly understand exactly what about your site caused it to do poorly in Yahoo, so that you don't replicate the mistake.

[soapystar]

i think the current silence tells its own story....when things DONT work suddenly guys are looking to discuss what they did again and what went wrong.....when so many people are so obviously nervous about entering into any form of debate i think you can take it that they are having some success...for many pro webmasters that only needs to be short term because of their high turnover of domains...if you are not in that league then yes a long term vision would be more appropriate..