Forum Moderators: open
Definitely some jumps though, still trying to determine what factors may be more/less at play.
Yahoo now has 1/4 of the pages indexed for my site than it did before April 1. Even the pre-April 1st index count was only was only 1/12th what Google has.
so it seems that:
IF you are in Yahoo directory THEN you are guranteed to be fully indexed.
Absolutely not, as you have discovered. We have been in the Y Directory for years ... they dropped all of our pages in all of our domains ... except one page each.
catchmeifucan:
To those whose index dropped from thousands to hundreds, are you an affiliate site?
do you have google adsense on it? why is Yahoo dropping you from the index?
Nope, 100% original content. Nope, no ads. We have no idea why Y dropped us. Whoever has been congratulating Y for communicating with publishers has an interesting definition of "communicating". We can't get anything out of them.
microlinx:
N,N,Y,N,N,Y
Like junai3 and steveb, we used to have thousands of pages in the Y index. Had them for years. Good positioning in the SERPS. Good quality inbound links. Distinct sites with distinct, original content. Our primary site has been a web benchmark in our industry for over a year because of its SE saturation and inbound links. Had Y Directory listing for all of that time, too.
Since January, Inktomi Slurp has gobbled up over 15 GIGABYTES of data from our servers. More on this at the end ...
Since January, quite literally ALL of our domains (~100) are now limited to a single page in the index. Since we use Overture's PPC program (for over 4 years) heavily (~$30,000/month), we have a dedicated "premium" support person we can call.
They're useless. All they can do is refer our questions to tech support who refers us to the FAQs. They really have no idea what's going on and why our sites have been affected so badly for so long.
More about Slurp:
According to our log files, the bulk of Slurp requests are the result of Slurp racheting through our PPC campaigns, checking one ad after another, over and over. With nearly 1 million PPC terms in our many campaigns, it's clear that Slurp has a secondary purpose. I can understand checking to see that a link in a PPC ad is functional, but over and over and over again? And nothing to show for it in the SERPS? Hmph.
We really have no idea why our sites were dropped or why they have not been at least partially included for the past 4 months, but here is the closest I can come to recognizing ANY kind of factor:
We used to use the Inktomi "paid inclusion" service that was downsized in January and has since been completely replaced by Site Match.
Could it be that this has had an effect?
Whaddya say, Tim? I noticed you have been absent since making your announcement.
Let's see some of that vaunted "communication" from Yahoo. What's happening? Why have so many sites been dropped, spidered heavily, and not made any sort of a comeback? What's with Slurp running through our PPC campaigns? Why so quiet? Why are your "premium" representatives so powerless to do anything?
You better get on the stick or you'll evaporate when MSN drops you completely.
I have been in Yahoo Directory since May 2003.
I added a domain name to my Yahoo! Store in Jan'04 and lost 100% in all search engines (bad redirect).
I regained Google traffic in Apr'04 and had just been picked up by ALL the other search engines in Feb'05.
In Dec'04 I counted 8,600 internal links in all engines, Jan'05 I got a PR5 and on March 31, the internal link count count had reached 140,000.
Today the same count is 11,000. Google is the only search engine that did not drop. Google thoughout has shown me with 23 external links since Sept'04. I do not know how to get the other search engines back link counts.
I cannot think of anything major I had changed in March. I use GR's SEO software and still no warning.
My keyword density beats all these sites, my link popularity is 5 times the nearest competitor, I've been around much longer, but now I'm gone.
Oh, and I also have spent THOUSANDS of dollars on PPC through Overture over the past 6 years.
Whatever Yahoo has done, it's extremely unfair and makes no sense whatsoever. The sites thay are high ranking are garbage "kiddie" sites.
I think it is a tactic to get the business sites to ante up more $$$ for site match, which is just this side of Highway Robbery!
Serious the serps on yahoo is SO stuffed with all those scraper sites now thet about 40-50% of whatever search you do is scrapers.
The spammers realy are back in the game.
I agree. Yet, Yahoo is so proud of the fact they have banned so many sites. It's their "quality control" ROFL. Unfortunately, in many cases, great content sites were banned because they may have had an affiliate link or two.
Yahoo has gone down hill.
C
the serps on yahoo is SO stuffed with all those scraper sites now thet about 40-50% of whatever search you do is scrapers.
Total exagerration.
great content sites were banned because they may have had an affiliate link or two.
That's far outside the realm of reality and easily disproved. Come on, let's be a little more rigorous.
Dont get me wrong they still have a bit more work to do but this recent update has certainly removed a good volume of some of the poor quality sites from the index.
They have also hit doorway pages and re-directs hard and a load of these have now vanished which is very refreshing.
Its nice to see Yahoo results returning sites that are in line with the search term requested.
As i say, some work still to be done but overall i think a very good job done. The results are better now than they ever were if you ask me!
About affiliate links, I dont agree, I dont think a SE would bane a site for affiliate links, maybe if there is nothing other on a site. Many great site with free info/service/pictures or what ever needs affiliates to keep a site alive, so no SE would ban anything.
The irony is that the 2,3,and 4 positions for "bar plans" now include 3 former customers who stole IP and created their own spin off site. I have a registered trademark, but they stole that too.
Now what, I can no longer compete against these thieves who Yahoo enabled to rise to the top?
I'd hire an attorney, but if I won, the judgemnent and 25 cents would get me a cup of coffee.
I can only say Yahoo whon't get any more of my business. They can let the scraper siteas rule thier directory, which will certainly earn them a bad name in the end....I can only hope.
One other thing, I purchased Express Inclusion from them last year for a site, and I still have not made it into the web listings. I'm in the directory, but whoever said being in the directory guarantees inclusion into the web results is full of it.
I have had nothing but bad luck with Yahoo since their April Fools Joke.
I can't imagine what you are looking at. What Yahoo does pretty well is rank good quality sites in relation to each other. What they do very poorly is they are overflowing with doorways and duplicates (less so redirects). The problem is almost as if there are two search piles that get mixed... the good sites that are ranked well according to a sane algorithm, and then utterly useless trash built on blog comments. Results 3, 7, and 15 might be the three best resources on a query, in that order, but then the other pages in the top 15 seem to come from a parallel universe where everybody worships anything with a couple hundred thousand blog comments.
Yahoo needs to add about 1000 times more authority to its algo, and figure out how to stop highly valuing plainly worthless algo ingredients.
Yahoo has made zero progress in getting rid of garbage in general, although they do seem to get rid of a lot of it in specific... in other words, 80% of the serps (in the competitive areas I'm in) have a revolving door of different garbage.
This recent update of course was terrible. Previously the results were more like 60/40 in favor of the garbage.
I think its just a beginning, i think Yahoo will comeback with another update, something like Part II No More Scrapers type of thingy. They are very easy to spot. I just do my manual work, if they are above me in SERPS - their days are counted... My main keyword phrase comeback after the Update from High 500 to #7, there are still 2 sites above me that have hidden text on the front page, one of them is a dead beat on the free hosting account that has about 30 dead links within a site and about 60 hidden words phrases - #5, and #2 hidden text as well, but he deserves to be there since he is a real deal business man for 25 years, I don’t mind at all.
Whatever they have done has improved their results from where I sit.
As a webmaster, I wish that Yahoo would add to their index more quickly. My stats on a site that had about 700 pages back in January (850 today).
Yahoo - 581 pages
MSN - 696 pages
Google - 815 pages
what I find terrible in Yahoo is that they always have problems to index sites.
It's been some time now that they completely screw up very good sites and keep scrapers/cloaking pages on top for certain search terms.
As I explained in another post, for example they almost dropped my homepage one week after April 1st (whish was the most consistent SERP for the keywords I observe) all my pages are indexed and rank pretty well but my homepage appears like the 90th page of my site, not the first anymore....no reason at all, im very carefull. Instead they have back on the top cloaking pages and spam.
I saw another site in the same case....all pages indexed, quality backlinks, no spam, no trick, good content, N1 for allinanchor in Google and when doing a search on site:www.fdsdffdggf.com it returns the homepage almost on the last position.
I am sick of Yahoo's craps like a lot of webmasters, if they can not get an algorithm ok after all this time they better say it right now...the happy guys are in MSN now, and it is just fair if Yahoo is loosing traffic.
Beside the poor results, I am sick of Yahoo's poor customer service policies...."we might reply", "no guarantee your site will be included" (express inluision $299/year)...who in their right mind would pay $299 /year and to NOT have thier site indexed...I DID! Last September I purchased express inclusion and my site only made it to the directory...it STILL does not come up under any search terms in the web results.
They have complete contempt for their paying customers while they cater to the portal and scaper sites.
Argh!
Always? I don't think so.
I see a better balance between all manner of sites for a given search.
Early this morning I did a search on my main key phrase in Yahoo....no reslts for my site.
A hour later, I did the same search, now the result has me in the #3 position...here where it get's weird(er)...another hour later, I did the same search and again, I am gone.
Slurp must be pretty busy with my site. Yesterday site:mydomain.com produced 258, now today 260, so it is indexing, but not to the search engine web results for a given keyword.
I'm not sure if I'm going to be included or not!
I feel like a "bobber", up and down lately.
Anyone else seeing this ping ponging of their listing?
I have 3 PC's on my desktop and clearing cookies sometimes produces different results...
I'm sure scratching my <snip> on this one!
(Ha! gotcha MB! I snipped it myself!)
Cheers!
When i say they always have problems to index sites, i'm refering to the 1000's of messages across the internet. Poor webmasters getting screw up because Yahoo spider is unable to do this and that....but takes cloaking page so well.
How come a billion dollar company working for so long on an algorithm is unable to take the most simple instruction for months and penalize website, "301" redirect that is.
Complains about Y! spider continuing to query pages non existing anymore for months, or their index returning pages old of something like a year or so are all over the web.
When i'm talking about srewing up, I am also a victim of their poor engine and algorithm. They totally screwed up my homepage..almost dropped it on yahoo.com while giving me consistant "normal" results all over the world. I noticed a few sites for the little number of keywords, that are experiencing the same.
They update their index on April 1st, then 1 week later it looks almost like a roll back to before the update, this is ridiculous, they might have dropper some spam sites, might, but as far as I can see the top 10 result for 15 keywords im watching constantly (for about 12 months) are spam, cloaking,scrapper. This was a lot of noise for screwing up nice websites and confirming that Yahoo is better at keeping black hat techniques on top.
I believe that it is so unprofessional, so much of a mess, and so unfair to honest website owners a 10 college students with some budget and equipment would do better in less than 1 year.
Yahoo is the most terrible indexing engine so far, at least for what I can observe, but a little search online, forums and blogs where people keep on complaining just confirms it.
