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Even though I am out of Yahoo most of the time, I am still getting over 1000 unique visitirs per day...
I've been online for 6 years and have a content rich site, minimal affiliate stuff but it's all relavant to the content. Good keyword density (Google Adsense tastefully integrated into my right shared border brings in $500+ per month)
I am #2 and #4 in Goggle for my main keyphrase.
doing a "site:mydomain.com" brings up 258 results for my domain in Yahoo.
I'll be damned if I know why I am being singled out.
I've spent THOUSANDs of dollars on <snip> at Overture too!
[edited by: martinibuster at 10:38 pm (utc) on April 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Tos#12 [/edit]
recently yahoo updated its index and we are affected by the aftershock. around april second week. our main website engaged in marine industry went down to 90+ from #1 spot.
but in other yahoo searches like yahoo.co.uk, asia, .fr and etc.
we rank the same #1 spot but, only in yahoo.com. we lost rank.
is this a penalty?
any idea what to do?
stays for a 1/2 hour or so, then out for a few hours, then back. 4 PC's on my network all show similar results.
Straight from the Yahoo content guidelines:
[help.yahoo.com...]
"Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called "spam." Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index. "
Regarding Affiliate content..see this interview with Jon Glick(Yahoo Senior Manager for Web Search) in April 2004 and his opinion of Affiliates:
"...but the issue with affiliate Spam is that they're trying to offer the same service as three hundred other people. ....So we are looking at how we can filter a lot of this stuff out. There are a lot of free sign up affiliate programs. They've pretty much mushroomed over the past few years. ..."
It is a fact that MANY sites with real useful content(including reference sites) have been banned because of Yahoo's automatic triggers.
While the bans are automatic, it's an uphill battle to PROVE your site innocent and get back in.
"I wouldn't say "Keyword spamming" is a reason for getting banned."
Straight from the Yahoo content guidelines:
[help.yahoo.com...]"Some pages are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results; this is often called "spam." Yahoo! does not want these pages in the index. "
Nothing there specifically about Keyword Spamming. It's only about spam in general. The fact of the matter is that the Ink algo has always and continues to like keywords. The more the better. Shove them in your url, slap them at the top of the code. Hammering your keywords for Yahoo with jackhammer force is one tried and true ingredient for doing well in Yahoo. If you don't know that by now I really urge you to rethink what you think you know about Yahoo.
Regarding Affiliate content..see this interview with Jon Glick(Yahoo Senior Manager for Web Search)... "...but the issue with affiliate Spam is that they're trying to offer the same service as three hundred other people...."
That doesn't mean they are going after affiliates. That clearly means they have a situation where three hundred people using the same affiliate feed and the same stale content are trying to spam their way into the top of the serps. Perfectly reasonable to filter this because he's talking about redundant content, also known as crap content.
If you don't know the basics of ranking in Yahoo (like Yahoo's fondness for keywords), and refuse to consider that maybe you may not have a grasp of the Y algo, then I can see one stretching facts to put the blame elsewhere.
But that is unscientific and downright primitive. Like accusing your neighbor of being a witch because your garden doesn't grow as green as hers.
Too much Affiliate content (how much is too much? no one knows!)
It's not so much that it is affiliate content, it's more a matter of it being redundant.
Excessive cross linking with another site
Very true.
Excessive cross linking with another site
What does "excessive" mean, and with what other site?
We have many domains, each of which is targeted at a particular niche within our broader industry,
i.e.
ourcompany.com has info about our company in general,
specialservice1.com describes what we do in that area,
specialservice2.com describes what we do in that area,
etc.
To get complete detailed information about what our company does, one would need to visit all of our sites because each is designed for a specialty. Likewise, each is optimized for a different keyword niche.
We have links to each of the other sites in the footer of each domain's pages, as you might expect. We do this (a) so visitors can browse our complete line of offerings and (b) so spiders can find all of our sites. Typical visitors are only interested in one of the services/sites, although we do record some cross-site traffic.
Is Y! insisting that we NOT link to our specialty sites because by linking to other domains that we own we are engaged in "excessive cross linking with another site"?
If I remove any references to our other sites (and incur a "natural" penalty by making it harder for visitors to browse our offerings), will we then conform?
I can see problems with owning a hundred domains, duplicating content on those domains and cross-linking them, but these are distinct sites and the only content that's duplicated on any of them is our basic company contact info and biographies on some of the sites.
It just seems to be at odds with the concept of the web, in general.
I run a sales site on one domain, and my membership site on another domain. The two link to each other on every page and in multiple areas, top, bottom, center, etc...
The two sites act as one. In fact I run an entire network of sites, and most link back to each other through the bottom shared border (FrontPage) as our network sites. Google seems to LOVE this, but Yahoo (trying to be different) does not?
MB, how much of a penalty would this be?
If anyone wants to see the site in question, see my profile for the URL.
Yahoo is Banning such sites because they contain such content...regardless of how unique or useful the rest of the site may be.
If anyone is interested, I can PM dozens of sites(not my own BTW) that
(a)Are blocked from Yahoo
(b)Contain very useful content to a specific audience
(c)The only apparent reason for their ban is that they derive profit from Affiliate links.
While other Large sites in the same niche(probably handpicked) remain in the index.
These are NOT autogenerated or scraper sites which interestingly still remain in the index!
BTW, here it is straight from Yahoo Mike:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Read the thread VERY carefully and it becomes very clear what is happening.
redundant content
what he actually says is
we'd rather put them directly in the store ourselves
What Yahoo_Mike said makes perfect sense to me. For human review they can't have strict formulas.
If I see a page that has no unique content and is simply a collection of information that can be found elsewhere on the web, and was created only to get affiliate income, I can see how that isn't valuable.However, if you write unique informational content and throw a couple of affiliate links to where people can buy the product, then it's of value to the end users, therefore of value to Yahoo.
It doesn't get any clearer than that. Perfectly reasonable and nothing different than Google is doing.
Of the sites that moved up into my previous position (#2) one site is a direct trademark and copyright violator of IP on our site.
I reported this to Yahoo! who basically replied, "contact that person directly, not us".
We contacted the owner of the site about a year ago, and they still continue to use a very close version of our uspto.gov registered trademark and copyrighted material (they were a former customer of ours).
Where's the enforcement here? What is the violator supposed to do, contact Yahoo themselves and ASK to be removed from the web results listings? Not likely.
This just shows that Yahoo! now supports Intellectual Property theft and I have a BIG problem with that.
The end result seems to be that they have now totally removed MY site from the listings.
I did a site:mydomain.com and my homepage is now at the END of the list. Does that indicate removal or banning?
"To reduce the chances that you will be categorized as an affiliate site, you should make sure that...
- You have a high ratio of original content to content that can be found on other sites
- You do not have an excessive number of links to other sites, and you shouldn't have links to sites that are unrelated to your own site (from a visitor's perspective).
What is the proper content ratio? What is considered to be an excessive number of links? There are no specific answers to those questions. You should use your best judgment, be objective and focus on making your site a valuable resource for your visitors. If you do that, you probably won't have any problems."
This tells me that their algorithm is:
(a)Counting outgoing Affiliate links and probably other links
(b)Comparing that count against some metric representing "original content" (maybe the number of pages which have no Affiliate or other outgoing links?)
(c)Banning sites which exceed some magic a/b ratio
Of course once you are banned, slurp will stop crawling your site, so even if you remove the "offending" links Yahoo will never detect the changes and will keep the penalty in place.
The only way to get back in is to actually have a "human Yahoo" review your site and judge it "worthy" to bypass the penalty algorithm.
Good Luck.
[edited by: jdwaverly at 1:46 pm (utc) on April 23, 2005]
2_much summarized it beautifully for soapystar
it may have been written for me, i can only take your word for that. However it has nothing to do with the post i made in this thread. You quoted from an interview and made your own interpretation. I simply took the actual quote from the interview. Its intersting that you needed to take issue with me for posting a straight quote.
Its intersting that you needed to take issue with me for posting a straight quote.
No, not taking issue. Just pointing out that 2_much was trying to inject a sober assessment into that thread and steer it away from unfounded conjecture and exaggeration.
Nothing wrong with filtering crap content.
Where's the enforcement here?
Hey microlinx, have you ever heard of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Yahoo has a link to instructions on resolving your problem at the footer of every serp.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:45 pm (utc) on April 23, 2005]
No, not taking issue. Just pointing out that 2_much was trying to inject a sober assessment into that thread and steer it away from unfounded conjecture and exagerration.
where was the need to specifically mention me? I had done nothing more than paste a quote from the interview. How is that unfounded conjecture?
where was the need to specifically mention me?
paste a quote from the interview.
Ok, here we go...
First, let's put your quote into context. The partial quote was in answer to a question about SPAM.
I tend to hear more from you guys at the search engines about the activities of less ethical affiliate marketers out there. Now those guys certainly live by their own rules. How do you deal with it?
The answer that follows is in the context of less ethical affiliate marketers.
Let me repeat that for you, The answer that follows is in the context of less ethical affiliate marketers.
The entire quote you mention in the second thread from December goes like this:
Or is the sole purpose of that site to transact on another site, so that someone can get a commission... if that's the case, we'd rather put them directly in the store ourselves, than send them to someone else who's simply telling them how to get to the store...If someone searches for a book and there are affiliates in there, we're giving the user ten opportunities to see the same information, to buy the same product, from the same store, at the same price. If that happens, we haven't given our user a good service or a good experience.
To twist those words around to imply something other than keeping the serps clean is a disservice to other members at WebmasterWorld who don't know enough to go read Mike Grehan's original interview themself with a critical eye.
The answer is clearly in the context of affiliate spam cluttering the serps- something no search engine wants- this isn't just Yahoo. Certainly, no reasonable person would want that either.
You can quibble and spin that to fit your worldview all you want but reasonable people are going to see that quote for what it is.
Original interview can be read over here [e-marketing-news.co.uk].
Yes, I have heard of the copyright act...and I already contacted Yahoo using the link at the bottom of the page, following their guidelines exactly. Their reply is that it's not their problem (even though they are the conduit for the IP thief).
I simply told them I would take it up with the USPTO and let them decide.
The next reply I received from Yahoo was:
" Hello: If you have a question specific to a Yahoo! Search listing, please return to our help site at: ...."
HAL, Open the pod bay door!
MY home page link has now been removed from the web results entirely. If that's not Yahoo!'s version of "the final solution" I don't know what is.
Is he the official Yahoo representative like GoogleGuy is for Google?
At first I thought it was just a new site behavior, but it appears to have gone beyond that now. With nearly a month of the home page only showing I'm stronly suspecting a penalty now.
The annoying this with all this is that the Yahoo spider continues to visit a few times a week and pickup a number of pages. Once in a while it sticks around and takes several dozen pages.
It is rather annoying that Yahoo continues to crawl the site if it isn't going to include any of the craws in the index. Being patient, I'll probably wait another month, and get some site redesign work done, before checking with Yahoo regarding penalties.
So far, MSN has been my best friend of the big four engines. They are sending me a couple of users per day and their spider stops in every few days to pickup a couple more pages.
Then april fools update or whatever it was...It went back to Home page...Not just one home page but now it shows two...
So Im in the same boat if thats any consolation. ive tried emailing them twice from the input page and no response yet...
Anyone have any insight on this, especially the two home page thing would be greatly appreciated. Or maybe an email add to the right place or folks to see if theres a penalty?
Site dropped 300 places, but is still indexed.
Any ideas?
Off Topic:
Threats to Yahoo, direct appeals to Yahoo, conspiracy theories about Yahoo, complaints about Yahoo, random rants unrelated to the topic of this discussion, etc.
I ask Yahoo Mike or Yahoo Tim to make a statement and advice webmasters on what to do.
based on the experience of webmasters, it seems that it is a complete fallacy that any site is ever re-reviewed let alone ever re-included back into the Yahoo index.
[webmasterworld.com...] #4
What are you trying to imply with msg #:58? Is this undeniable proof that Yahoo does indeed re-review penalized sites?
My penalized sites are continually spidered by Yahoo. They are also in the index and you find them by searching for the domain names. However until the penalty is removed they will never appear in any real search result. This is no consolation at all.
Of course once you are banned, slurp will stop crawling your site, so even if you remove the "offending" links Yahoo will never detect the changes and will keep the penalty in place.
How did you discover this? If so, then those of us who are being hammered by Slurp are not banned, and there is some other problem/issue that keeps all of our pages except a "sandbox" type index page out of the SERPS.
