17,500 indexed pages and still no traffic from Yahoo!

[ichthyous]

Hi there...I am perplexed by the fact that my site has almost 17,500 pages indexed in Yahoo search, but almost no traffic is being generated. I used to get almost half my traffic from Y, now it's down to 200-300 people a day. Has anyone else seen thier sites be fully indexed and yest get no traffic at all? Was there some sort of underlying problem? Google has far fewer of my pages indexed but I get between 1,200 and 2,000 visitors a day from them. Strange!

[martinibuster]

How many words of original (and I mean ORIGINAL) content do you have on each of these 17,500 pages?

[randle]

Has anyone else seen thier sites be fully indexed and yest get no traffic at all?

Lots of people, quite a bit back Yahoo went to a model where if your site is penalized you still appear in the index, everything is correct, except you will never rank for anything.

First thing to do is determine if you have been hit with the mysterious Yahoo penalty flag.

[ichthyous]

Well, most of the 17,500 pages are dynamic pages with little content. It is basically an online store with pictures and text describing the products. I'm not surprised that those don't rank. But about 1,000 of the pages are original content and rank well in google. when i run a site:www.mysite.com they all appear in Yahoo but they don't rank at all. How do I determine whether my site has been penalized? Please elaborate...

[ichthyous]

Ok I did some research and found that only certain of my dynamic pages come up in Y search. Since my web site started out as a Flash site I used a cloaking system for the text. Those are the only pages which rank at all in the SEs. The dynamic pages have so little text on them that they only pop up in Y search if someone types in an extremely specific term or something obscure...I just tested this and it was the case. Yahoo has very effectively banned all of my cloaked pages and left the uncloaked pages to show in the results. Problem is it's only the cloaked ones that have any chance of ever ranking :-( Should I assume that there is no hope whatsoever of Yahoo allowing my cloaked pages through, even though I am using them for a Flash site and not to spam them?

[texasville]

What I find amazing is that you aren't penalized in google for cloaking?!..

[ichthyous]

My site has been well indexed in Google for a long time. From what i hear they take a more practical approach and will leave a web site be if they see that they are cloaking because they are using Flash or other non SE friendly pages. I think once you are in and nobody complains they leave you alone. Since MSn and yahoo are newer they just applied filters across the board that wipe you out

[randle]

Since MSn and yahoo are newer they just applied filters across the board that wipe you out

Exactly, you’re either fine, or your zapped with a penalty that sends you to internet oblivion, and generally speaking there’s no coming back.

Google, on the other hand handles these matters in a much more eloquent fashion; you just sort of sink down a bit in the rankings depending on how egregious your actions have been. And if you make amends you can slowly rise back up.

[reaper]

Well I have had up to 70,000 pages indexed with little content and made some nice sales. It has dipped to 10,000 pages with a hit in sales reflected. Nevertheless I am still getting traffic from Y and since have created a similar site with different optimisation and about 12,000 of those pages have been indexed in the last 3-4 weeks. Not getting rich but paying for my hosting and and expensive hobbies.

[reaper]

ichthyous
Are you using a mod rewrite when you refer to dynamic pages?

[renee]

do the following:

search [site:yourdomain] and you will get your 17,500 pages
then do
search [site:yourdomain keyword] where keyword is any word that exists in all your pages such as "copywrite" etc. You'll find the number of pages as way smaller than the 17,500.

This is an indication that Yahoo now has a separate index similar to Google's supplemental. These pages exist in the Yahoo index only to let Yahoo to claim they have 9 billion pages in their index. they are not included in any serps where the number of entries in the serps is significant. sounds very similar to the google supplemental index!

[ichthyous]

By dynamic pages I mean pages generated from a database, not static HTML pages. I don't have much mod-rewrite going on on my site...why do you ask?