Adding shopping cart = penalty?

booted out of yahoo after adding a cart

[sniffer]

Our site received strong traffic from Y! for a few years and as soon as i added a shopping feature on the back of our content pages, we're nowhere to be seen - total referrals from Y! now less than 1%. I have'nt changed anything else during this time

Any advice?

[Nika]

Remove the shopping feature! You wouldn't take this as an advice, would you?

However the situation could exist that your site's rankings where categorized somehow, not deemed as a web-store. If removing the shopping pushs the site back, so this is it. Make new site and link from homepage of your highly ranked one to it then. Hope not very stupid advice...

[martinibuster]

Do any of your competitors in the serps have shopping carts?

[PatrickDeese]

> as soon as i added a shopping feature

"As soon as"? The next day? A week later? A month later?

Right after the Yahoo update on April 1st?

Have all your pages with the changes even been cached by Yahoo?

What did the changes on the site involve, exactly? Did you just add "shopping" to the navigation, or did you add "shopping" content to all the pages?

Did you change URLs of ranking pages?

Did you substantially change the keyword density of the ranking pages?

[sniffer]

i just checked again today using the site: command and its returing 0 results :/

martinibuster- yes, most of them have an ecommerce enabled site - but would have done so from the start

how i set up the cart was to keep the content pages (which were indexed) and link from them to a new page featuring just the product name, picture, price. The content pages are static but the cart pages are dynamic

Patrick,

Happened pre update, and the only thing to change in the content pages is a form button saying eg "order here"

ive sent them email but so far the automated reply...it has been over 2 weeks since our banning

any further ideas?

All i can think of is: duplicate penalty for repetition of titles/product names or something... but surely they wouldnt ban you for this? Or perhaps the addition of a lot of pages over a smaller amount of time - probably 100 pages in two months

[sniffer]

i finally received a reply from a human - though, i dont think they had read my emails as they claimed that "there is no evidence you have been droppped from our index"

then how is it that a 'site:' search returns ZERO results when we previously had big referrals from Yahoo? It doesnt even look as though they've even bothered to visit our site

Am i missing something?