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A review request to reportsearchspam@yahoo-inc.com seems to have done the trick. I found the tip somewhere on this forum only but I am unable to find that thread now.
If you:
(a)Have an established site with incoming links
(b)Have seen slurp crawling a variety of pages for several months
(c) site:mydomain.com shows only your homepage
then you are being blocked(penalized, banned) from the index, regardless of the activity of Slurp.
Many of those who are banned see greatly reduced activity from Slurp...a few pages a day.
For many Slurp crawling is reduced to the point where they see only robots.txt and their index page crawled on most days.
However, with a penalty in place these OTHER pages never appear in the Yahoo index.
I have a feeling my site has been penalized being that the database driven nature of the site can generate a lot of very similar pages. Those pages now have "noindex" tags to cut down on the redundancy, but I fear getting back into Yahoo! will be a nightmare.
This is why none of us are having any success getting our sites re-reviewed and re-included in Yahoo. We are contacting Yahoo and using search-feedback@yahoo-inc.com, or webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com. We need to start using reportsearchspam@yahoo-inc.com and not the appropriate and officially method as told to us by Yahoo_Mike.
My main page changes from time to time, but only to keep fresh content. Yahoo seems to penalize my site for updating the content.
Anyone else know about this penalty?
I tried the webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com for a re-review and it did no good.
After a month of ping ponging in and out of Yahoo for a particular key phrase, I thought I was back in, but now I'm back out.
Is only your homepage indexed?
My main page changes from time to time, but only to keep fresh content. Yahoo seems to penalize my site for updating the content.
Two sites that I am working on both get new regular content; both are out of the index.
Although we see a pattern, its highly unlikely that Yahoo would penalize you for adding fresh content, unless you are in violation of their content policies.
I tried the webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com for a re-review and it did no good.
Join the club :(
No,I find 298 pages listed when doing a site:mydomain.com
However, when I am "in", the index page is listed first in those results. We I am "out" it is listed near the bottom of those 298 pages.
I did add some <H1> tags to the index page, which seem to have penalized that page.
I did a cleanup of the external page links, removed the heading text and cleaned up my keywords and added a classification meta tag.
Now I will wait and see if the Yahoo! fairy likes it or not. This is really ridiculous.
I must say (IMHO) I think Yahoo's results have been seriously degraded after 4/1/2005. The sites they moved up seem to violate all the rules of good design and good, useful content, while established sites with useful content which were growing rapidly in traffic were removed.
I'll say it again (and it is only my opinion, hopefully not to be snipped) It really seems as though Yahoo has removed successful sites in an effort to force them to use more of their new paid inclusion services. If that is the case, I would rather spend my money on Google, which is suppling a reliable search result (at least for my case). Yahoo (IMHO) has become too unpredicatable and is loosing trust.
I would hope Yahoo would continuing to improve their algo over the next few weeks or months.
I'll say it again (and it is only my opinion, hopefully not to be snipped) It really seems as though Yahoo has removed successful sites in an effort to force them to use more of their new paid inclusion services.
Look, I'm not trying to put you down, but, that doesn't make any sense at all. I say this respectfully, think about what you are saying: How can Yahoo remove only "successful" sites and put "unsuccessful" sites in the top ten? That statement is illogical. Someone has to be "successful."
Yahoo seems to penalize my site for updating the content...
I did add some <H1> tags to the index page, which seem to have penalized that page.
Seems like a lot of guessing without the homework to back it up. It's not useful to shrug your shoulders and assume that something hurt you without doing the necessary research to back it up. It's unproductive to assume a penalty when a site doesn't meet all the metrics of being penalized. Making unsubstantiated assumptions won't ever help you. Here's how to put some focus in what you are seeing, or think you are seeing:
Deconstructing Yahoo for Fun and Profit
The right approach is to do some searches and study a wide range of serps. Look at what people are doing and how they are doing it.
Do all of that and you will start to feel more confident about what Yahoo is looking for, and will avoid the pitfalls of making random guesses that may not be helpful for improving your situation.
Random assumptions are worthless for improving your serp positions. You really have to spend hours and even days looking at this, breaking it down, to get a feel for the algo.
After you have a feel, you are ready to revisit your website, with objective eyes. You might even consider having someone else take a look at it, too.
From what I'm seeing in this thread, some people are under the mistaken impression they're penalized when it may not be the case. Not ranking and being penalized are not the same thing. Just because Google loves a website's anchors and IBL's doesn't mean Yahoo is going to love that same website's minimal content, etc.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:54 am (utc) on May 11, 2005]
Look, I'm not trying to put you down, but, that doesn't make any sense at all. I say this respectfully, think about what you are saying: How can Yahoo remove only "successful" sites and put "unsuccessful" sites in the top ten? That statement is illogical. Someone has to be "successful."
I understand your lack of mis-understanding...
I do a ton of resesearch in my niche market and I know pretty much where all my competitors and partner sites are, traffic wise, link popularity, keyword density, etc.. and (as useless as it may be to some) Alexa. I have seen sites with nearly logarithmic traffic trends suddenly removed from Yahoo's search results in favor of portal sites.
The comment was from my frame of reference, so I don't expect you to be able to make sense of it...well, maybe now you can.
I agree with the assumption bit...but as I mentioned, Yahoo's changes seem to be varying over the past few weeks and this forum had mentioned the heading tags as being a possible trigger for penalty.
I'm to the point that I'll try anything because the sites that are moving up have no good qualities other than being affiliate sites with very thin content...just enough to get Yahoo's eye, but Yahoo seems to be blind enough to miss the obvious black hat techniques.
The reason I ask is that I run a ranking program (Submit Wolf) that ranks a certain key phrase against the majority of the search engines. This morning a search showed me ranked as #2 in Yahoo for my preferred search term (my old position.
(note: I cleared the programs rank cache and it then gave a result of #4, my position from 10 days ago, the search does a live check of all engines and takes a few minutes to complete on broadband).
A quick double check in Yahoo! shows no such correlation.
Furthermore...in the past I have noticed between the three PC's on my desktop, I could get differnt Yahoo results between each PC. Deleting cookies or rebooting all three usually resoved the differences.
All PC's are generally clear of spyware / adware, toolbars and are checked weekly with registry mechanic, xoftspy and Spybot S&D.
So, my questions to you Yahoo guru's out there, is:
Can we assume we have been penalized, when it only looks that way from or point of reference? and in fact we still are showing up in Yahoo from different user locations, networks, PC's around the country or world?
One get's the assumption that the search results should be "vanilla" worldwide...or are the web search results actually "totty-fruity" worldwide?
My site is still in the 10th range in Google and has been climbing steadily. I don't think I'll give up my <H1>s and other optimization techniques in favor of Yahoo which brings just 7% of my total traffic.
I do a ton of resesearch in my niche market and I know pretty much where all my competitors and partner sites are...
Researching your competitors and researching Yahoo are two different things- One hundred percent different.
I urge you to go back and consider my post again. It's obvious that Yahoo is eluding you, so what needs to be done is start from square one and research Yahoo.
Forget your competitors. Work with serps that are completely different from your own. Otherwise you won't have an objective eye.
I know where my competing sites stand IN YAHOO.
Where else would I be talking about.
Are you telling me that what they have done to get top listing is NOT what I should do or emulate in some fashion?
I've done 99% of what you laid out in your previous post. I was in the #2 position on Yahoo for over three years. Now what on earth am I supposed to do, throw all what I knew about Yahoo out the window?
I am #2 in Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AOL and more but now Yahoo drops me for no reason, other than to force me to buy their new products.
My site was doing very well at the end of March (the log curve was on the upswing) and then coincidentally they release a bunch of new "products" like Site Match...I may be off topic and paranoid now, but I can't imagine this is algo related at all.
I seem to be manually booted, so I am forced to buy their "products". No one needs to say it, they certainly won't. They move a bunch of trash up and what? I'm supposed to follow suit by making changes that will probably get me booted from Google.
Yahoo is now loosing my direct business. I'm dropping my PPC account and hiring a good SEO company to figure it out. I'm already paying $150 month to Overture.
Read my posts here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Removed the H1 Tag, recovered 300 positions.
Microlinx: Have you tried this?
I am #2 in Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AOL and more but now Yahoo drops me for no reason, other than to force me to buy their new products.First off AOL uses Google search results. it doesn't matter if you rank number one on Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves because Yahoo is not Google, MSN or Ask Jeeves, they all are different in the ways they rank web sites.
now Yahoo drops me for no reason, other than to force me to buy their new products.Yes, I think you are paranoid :). They likely added weight to a factor that your web site is weak in or you are using Spam, linking to a web site that Yahoo thinks is Spamming. As it's been said before, you need to relook over your web site very carefully and see what is going wrong.
My site was doing very well at the end of March (the log curve was on the upswing) and then coincidentally they release a bunch of new "products" like Site Match...I may be off topic and paranoid now, but I can't imagine this is algo related at all.
I sent an email to reportsearchspam@yahoo-inc.com and tried to explain what was going on with my site that (exept for the index page) hasn't been in the SERPS since early February.
I sent this about two weeks ago and got an email reply today thanking me by name and saying "We'll take a look"!
Wow! Now I'm afraid they'll look at all my sites and ban the others too. :-(
[help.yahoo.com...]
and clicking "no" at the bottom. I then filled out the form with my question and got an email back from:
search-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
a few days telling me they would take a look. It has been a week since then, and they contacted me today to tell me that yes my site does have a penalty.
They gave me a link to their guidelines as well as a link for a site re-review.
I am definitely guilty of breaking their guidelines as I have links pages where I trade reciprocal links. However, all my competitors have links pages, as well as every other SERPs that I have studied in Yahoo. So could this be the problem? Could I have gotten caught, while my competitors haven't? If I don't have links pages, I will loose position in other search engines.
I also have over a thousand of dynamically generated pages. Yahoo's guidelines say they don't like dynamic pages that make for similar content. However, each of my pages represents a real estate property - and they are very different. Could this be the problem? Most of my competitors have just a couple of hundred of pages.
Before I submit my re-review, I obviously need to fix the problem. Could it be the database pages? Or is it more likely the link exchanges and I've just gotten caught while my competitors continue with good rankings?
Sometimes I feel their fight with "spam" is getting absolutely ridiculous.
Deconstructing Yahoo for Fun and Profit
Great post MB - thanks...
Certianly that isn't why Yahoo had dropped thousands of websites? I have a reciprocal links directory with many pages and a reciprocal links form but I don't consider it a "link farm". The Yahoo generic email I recieved several months ago listed "- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka "link farms")" as a reason to be banned.
Maybe Yahoo considers any reciprocal link directory a link farm.
Any one else care to comment?
Wally
Each of the dynamic pages represents a different widgets. Each widget has it's own unique 6 photos, description and pricing info. But maybe because each page has a similar format, It has triggered a spam filter.
I will detune the site, submit for the re-review and let you all know what happens.
Actually Quite "Hypocritical" if you ask me....Does yahoo, use dynamic pages... a few years ago they where qouted to be changing to "PHP"
We use a database to store our directory since we can check to see which links are still a live.
Tried that site:mydomain.com and returned our homepage, tried a different site returned 1,800...
Thank god, google is growing strong....
I've looked through my stats for the last year and don't see any reason to keep paying Yahoo for Overture clicks or recurring annual directory fees so I'm canceling all that stuff and concentrating on other search engines that aren't so self serving.
Maybe Yahoo considers any reciprocal link directory a link farm.
I would not dismiss this notion, we have had some responses from Yahoo on a site that was removed and that is where they are placing the problem. Just because you have sites, (which we do) with “links” pages and are doing well (which we are with other sites) does not mean they whole heartedly embrace this method. What they suggested we look at was relevancy of the links, so that’s where we are focusing.
Justin
