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I should point out that we don't use any blackhat or any other questionable SEO tactics, so I don't quite know how they could have caused this. But I can tell you that every single keyword that we had is gone.
Does anyone know how they could do this? And what can we do to get our rankings back? We've done the email Yahoo thing, and well you all know how effective that is.
Any help on this would be appreciated.
My domain had been submitted to a directory NOT by me but by a competitor you can bet your life on it. This particular directory was showing my content for almost every one of my key word searches but with their URL in the cache. (The 302 redirect issue we have all read about) Everywhere I looked this sucker was on my back like a leech.
I have had problems with this in the past but this one was really killing off my rankings, it must of been a dupe content issue, what else could it be?
Luckily and I mean very luckily the directory owner was very apologetic and removed the offending link right away. I did ask him for the email from his records for the person who submitted my domain to his directory but he said he didn't have it so that was that.
Point is that was blatant sabotage, there was absolutely no other listings in this directory that were remotely similar in content, so it wasn't randomly picked out of the SERPS it was submitted 100% by some 3rd party. (That answers your title question)
Have you checked all of your KW target's in the SERPS for your content but with someone else's domain? Or even a unique sentence from your content will usually show anything un- toward.
Sorry If I'm stating the obvious here, IE you have already checked that out but there's always the possibility you haven't :-)
My domain had been submitted to a directory NOT by me but by a competitor you can bet your life on it...This particular directory was showing my content for almost every one of my key word searches but with their URL in the cache.
Don't bet your life that it was a competitor. More likely it was the directory/scraper owner. Scraper sites make their sites look like directories.
If someone pays to submit to a directory there will be a trail. That sounds like either a scraper site or someone was deliberately cloaking your site.
In either case, afaik, Yahoo fixed that issue a while back.
Simply by stating a claim of copyright infringement has been filed with regards to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA - [copyright.gov...] you can have a competitor or innocent site dropped entirely from Yahoo! search.
All it requires is a personal malicious complaint, or else get some low-paid foreign worker to stick their name on the DMCA report against another site - and, voila! - instant hand removal from Yahoo! of the entire contents of the targeted website.
Heck, let's forget malicious - after all, misunderstandings happen. Perhaps you blogged about another site and quoted a section, published their headlines via RSS, or simply had their trackback on your site when they blogged about you - now what is to stop the person you quoted from misunderstanding application of "fair use" or how blogs work, and filing a DMCA complaint against your domain to Yahoo!, thus completely removing it from the Yahoo! search index?
Even worse, Yahoo! doesn't think it has to tell you about your site being delisted. Maybe you'll just wake up one day and wonder where your referrals from Yahoo! have gone. And if so, don't expect to ever get any answers anytime soon.
It's a system that is open to abuse, and can be easily used to punish targeted webmasters and business owners because:
1) Yahoo! will not check the validity of DMCA complaints,
2) Yahoo! will not inform the webmaster/site owner of the copyright complaint against them,
3) Yahoo! will not even make a public report to a body such as chillingeffects, whom Google refer their DMCA complaints to for public reference,
4)A webmaster will be unable to get a response from normal Yahoo! search channels as to the reason why their site is suddenly not listed in Yahoo!
5) A webmaster who finally discovers that a DMCA has been filed, will be unable to learn what that complaint is, and generally faces a continued communications blackhole, and inability to rectify the matter.
This presents a remarkably simple method for removal of third-party sites through malicious reporting.
More importantly does anyone know what we can do to get these ranking back, or at least get some one at Yahoo to take 5mins to look at the situation? You think they would with all the money we give them every month. Very frustrating to say the least...
Any help would be appreciated.
Sounds like we are in the same situation. Since the recent Yahoo update on the first of the month I have seen my clients website rankings completely disappear from Yahoo SERP's . Previously were positioned very strong there for years.
After looking into this further I took snippets of text from the client website and tried it in the search. It retuned many scraper websites using 302 redirects to link to the client. I checked the competitors targeting the same keywords and see that none of them are being attacked using this scraping/302 methods. I have to think this is effecting the search results as they apply to the client. The client has not dramatically changed their website, all though they do add pages here and there like any website looking to keep a fresh standing in the search engines. You can even try typing the client name into the search at yahoo and have all most all scrapper website SERP's returned.
Thanks,
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:54 pm (utc) on July 16, 2005]
.. did this party actually imply that they had sabotaged your Y ratings?
.. or are you possibly reading things into this that ain't actually there?
Its really important. Much more so, keep perfect unaltered copies of all emails.
I'd like to hear how this all turns out. -Larry
Simply by stating a claim of copyright infringement has been filed with regards to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA - [copyright.gov...] you can have a competitor or innocent site dropped entirely from Yahoo! search.
OMG, so now i see how one of my sites died in Yahoo! i just couldn believe it it dropped from 900+ listing to 2! wow ....
Yes they actually implied. They also suggested they are just getting started. ie. Google and MSN next.
A tad concerned I am.
This past three weeks I have had an issue with a Yahoo-sponsored site that was displaying whole pages of my site text verbatim. Far from it being a simple matter of just notifying Yahoo of this situation, Yahoo made me practically send them an affidavit about it. This was even though I had already sent them two emails and a letter iterating one by one every single instance of word-for-word infringement, the location of the infringement, where it had been taken from, a signed assertation that I was the true owner of the copyright, etc. Yahoo still did nothing whatsoever until I emailed them that I would be contacting a lawyer about Yahoo's foot-dragging and that I would be charging Yahoo rent of $1000/day for my text they were allowing to be shown without my permission. Only then did they take down the page, NOT the whole site.
Far from it being a simple matter of just notifying Yahoo of this situation...
It is NOT a simple matter. You have to file an official DMCA complaint. I've never had to file one with Yahoo or MSN because filing one with Google usually gets the offender to take down my content from their website.
Yet even with Google you have to make specific legal statements before they contact the other party. This is a legal action, an informal letter will not suffice.
Obviously, you should see a lawyer about this. While the lawyer - or law enforcement - might be able to get them to say something they'd really regret I wouldn't suggest trying to do that on your own.
But again, I wonder how a search engine could allow a competitor to sabotage rankings. If this is possible it would/could open the flood gates on this sorta thing... Love to know what they did to cause this.
And you would think that Yahoo would be more helpfull in this situation. Especially given the fact we are a "platinum" sponsor. The contact we have had with them regarding this situation has been extremely unhelpful. Makes us want to stop our bidding in Y! and dump everything into Google and other ppc programs. Sigh... lol
