Yahoo Penalty Removed

Brought site within Yahoo guidllines & boom! I'm back.

[junai3]

Updating everyone on my Yahoo penalty. I tried several things without removing my links pages. Nothing worked. I then removed my links pages and re-resubmitted through:

[add.yahoo.com...]

Within a week, I saw 3 pages indexed by Yahoo. 5 days later my entire site is re-indexed. I am not doing well yet in the rankings yet for my main keywords.

[junai3]

Sorry, Jagger has nothing to do with Yahoo.

I was simply trying to relate my cleaning up a site that was penalized with Yahoo and another that was ousted by Google. Both of which came back after cleaning up links pages.

[soapystar]

cleaning up a site that is banned in Yahoo will do nothing unless it gets a human review. Therein lies the difference. Google will only ban for outright cheating. No doubt someone will argue that a links page is cheating since its their to boost your ranking. However grey areas like this are left to filters in Google. You always have the chance to clean a site and get it back.
Yahoo have banned sites for reasons that remain a mystery to many, perhaps to yahoo themsleves though they deny this. Once banned the rules for you are different. You are now required to stick to their guidlines which of course only applies to banned sites wanting a review. So you cant build a site on the same lines as 99% of the other sites in the index. I find comparions between Yahoo and Google pointless if you are TRULY banned.

[randle]

Your assessment is a good one; penalties applied algorithmically, then a human review needed to get back in. I think that really tells you a lot about the status, or evolution of their algorithm. There is a lot more facets to an algorithm than just ranking sites well; keeping out the bad, and allowing the good in, are two significant areas. I think its safe to say Google has spent a great deal of effort on this, and it’s not the real glamorous part of having a search engine so credit should be given to them on that. Think about it, critical assessment generally does not come from the fact that certain quality sites just are not there, the grade is given on the overall appearance of the results. It’s an easy way out of a complex challenge; people notice the bad that is there or not there, i.e. “It’s filled with spam”, or, “I see much less spam”. However searchers will be much less prone to reactions like, “hmmm, these sites are ok, but I really thought there would be higher quality ones here”. You are not as aware of the good that is missing.

Its there index and they can do whatever they want. In addition, I am a believer in the concept that no one has a “right” to be in an index no matter how great your site may be. However, I think at this juncture it’s a very fair and constructive criticism, to say that the Yahoo algorithm that applies the penalty is not refined and is tagging many quality sites that were constructed without any aspect of what is accepted in the webmaster community as disingenuous methods to increase rankings. (I won’t talk about hats and colors as that is, and always will be, an overly simplistic view of the behavior of the people who create web sites intended to rank well organically). The fact that you have all these re-inclusion requests, having to be looked at by humans, would suggest a system, or algorithm, that is not working very well.

I feel, it would be in Yahoo’s best interest to either refine the part of the algorithm that is applying all these penalties, (dare I say err on the side of caution?) or conversely take the human element out of the re-inclusion process and give a legitimate means for getting back in. Your site either meets the guidelines or it doesn’t; right now in a great deal of cases, where a site does in fact meet the guidelines, Yahoo isn’t sure, and neither is the webmaster, but the end result is you will not be allowed into the results until you are one of the fortunate few.

Sometimes you get the feeling their approach to the cure is worse than the illness. You will never get great looking results when penalties are a major facet of your algorithm. At the end of the day you’ve got to figure out how to rank the sites.

It’s a great index, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like their really struggling with this part of it.

[soapystar]

good points. But lets not forget that those sites banned in the first momments of the switch last year were not banned by a yahoo filter or human review. They were part of a database of imported banned sites the accuracy of which is dubious. Very few people bothered to question the Ink bans because who was to see the implications of being on that list at that point. It was noticeable at that time that certain people and sites were offered intimate help to get their sites back. What does that tell you about the fraility of the system. oh and dont forget the 'nice email' factor.

[nealw]

My Yahoo Experience:

My site has been out of Yahoo since the Inktomi debacle. (And years ago I did do the paid inclusion and then quit the program...Mmmm?) I have probably sent about a dozen re-inclusion requests over the past year and half, via email and via the re-review form.

At one point in time, 2-3 years ago, I probably deserved a penalty for duplicate content. Back in the day I did replicate some content from a custom created search directory. And to make it worse I had a couple of .cgi scripts which were duplicating even more content, though back accident.

Anyway...all of this has been fixed long ago. All the search engines love my site except Yahoo.

Just like others with a penalty:
- Only my homepage was listed in the serps.
- Slup comes on a regular basis and finds pages.
- The ratio of robots.txt to actual pages spidered is "about" 1:1. Recently this ratio has bettered by a slight margin.

I have a "free" organic listing in the Yahoo Directory. Which by the way ranks as one of the top links in the category.

I was accepted as a YPN Beta tester. Where I assume someone reviews your website for quality. (I guess my site is good enough for them to display ads on but not good enough for them to list in their serps.)

AND NOW...

Well I sent my last re-inclusion request about 3 weeks ago. Now I am seeing some "new" activity so to speak.

About 10 days ago site:www.domain.com showed 9 pages and increased every other day or so. Today it now shows 83 pages for the 'site:' command.

Here's the catch so far:
1.) Half the pages show a title in 'lowercase' with no description.
2.) The other half show no title and only the URL.

QUESTION...

Does anyone have any insight as to what this means? Right now I am just waiting to see what if any thing changes.

- Is the penalty being slowly lifted?
- Do these new pages in the index mean anything?
- Or perhaps Yahoo is indexing a few more pages but has done nothing with the manual penalty?
- Or perhaps the manual penalty has been removed and now it is there algorithmic filter?

If anyone has any additional insight that would be great.

Thanks!

[energylevel]

What it means ... who knows, if you find out let us know .. Yahoo is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. I actually had a dialogue about my site with a person from Yahoo that has been pretty much nuked from their index. Firstly I was pleasantly surprised to have any kind of reply but I was left mystified when told my site didn't have a penalty, yet I don't rank for anything even company name and Slurp seems to only be indexing my homepage... My site is 5 years old, clean and ranked well for a long time up untill the last few months.....

[4crests]

NealW, my story is very similar and also started with INKTOMI. I have also been trying again and again for re-inclusion. So far I have had no luck, but your post does give me hope.... THANKS.

[Becca800]

Does anyone have any insight, or can you make a best guess, as to when the next Yahoo update will be?

[bostongio]

I run a clean, white hat site for a widget topic that has no product selling, but is big topic that folks search for online. Been doing it for a decade and am listed as the number 2 resource in a high-level top Yahoo directory.

A few weeks ago, Yahoo decided to de-list my site completely. No notice, nothing. Just traffic that accounted for 10-20% of my totals gone within a few weeks. I finally figured it out that apparently an old domain that I had aliased to the main site (years ago, just to park it) was causing them a problem (but of course, they don't tell you what exactly the problem is!). Their engine had picked up the aliased domain instead of the main domain. Then I guess one of their duplicate content filters kicked in and boom, all content was gone.

After going back and forth with them and writing fairly detailed emails, I got back the infamous "you're back in" email (which says nothing of the sort, btw). Of course, meantime, I'm still getting next to zilch referrals from Yahoo.

What I'm upset about is that there's obviously some mechanism -- whether it's manual (a person) or automated -- that does this banning of a site. Why not just build-in one more step and shoot off an email to the site's "webmaster" address to let them know? Because while it's easy to think that this is always deserved (guilty until proven innocent), who knows how often that's the case?

Search engines, Google included, have too much control over our destinies as publishers. I'm just trying to do my job, and find that due to a simple decision made years ago (long before search engines were penalizing people for such activities), I was de-listed. Legitimate publishers should find a way to ban together to stop this sort of thing from happening.

[SincerelySandy]

onlineleben asked...

Is it possible that a new domain (not registered before) could get penalized?
I only get visits from slurp to the index.html and robots.txt and there is no technical reason why links to other pages on the site cannot be followed.
Any ideas?

I have launched about 10 sites with new domain names in the last 6 months. Only one of these sites had a "links" page. The sites without a links page were listed correctly and completely in yahoo within 2 or 3 weeks. The site with a links page took about a month and only the homepage was listed with no description. After 6 months of updating it's pages and one remodeling of the layout yahoo still only listed the homepage. Then one day I decided to clean up my links page. I did not have many links on my links page and they were all relevant but I removed 2 of the 8 links on the page. A few days later, after 6 months of just my index page being listed, the rest of the site was listed, complete with descriptions.

[rjfreitas]

Earlier this summer I was getting about 400 uniques per day from Yahoo, and this stopped at the end of July. Now I get about 10 per day. If I do a site:domain.com Yahoo shows about 175 pages indexed with titles and descriptions.

I submitted to the free directory in May, and I do have a links page.

Do you think I received a penalty and that is why I lost traffic?

Should I try a re-inclusing request to see if I have a penalty? Or could this make matter worse?

Thanks.