3-5 Year old site Gone?

Seo

[aggie12thman]

Guys, I've been in the top 3 listings for 3-5 years for two sites targeting <blue widgets> and <green widgets>. These two sites are gone from Yahoo. Any idea what's going on?

We haven't done anything to think of that would cause this. However, there have been other sites out there who are copying our content for their own sites. Could this cause us to completely disappear? Duplicate content

[edited by: martinibuster at 6:33 am (utc) on Mar. 21, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed URLs and Specifics. [/edit]

[Crush]

Either links pages or you got an affiliate site they they see the same as the others in the serps and they decide to tank you.

I would get rid of the seo like links pages and do a reinclusion request.

[sit2510]

>>> These two sites are gone from Yahoo. Any idea what's going on?

Some of my sites were/are experiencing roller-coaster events in Yahoo during the past several months. At some period, the sites just disappear without reason and only to reappear some weeks later and I didn't do anything. There are also chances that you may come back later, but your chance would become zero if it is penalized (you can check it by doing site search and only homepage appears).

[maximillianos]

Duplicate content can definitely get you in trouble with Yahoo. I had setup my site many years ago and pointed all my domains to my only website thinking it as a good idea to bring type in traffic from anywhere I could. Well years went by and unknown to me, search engines (like yahoo) were indexing my site under all those different domain names. It suddenly appeared that my site was duplicated across 5-6 domains, even though those domains simply pointed to my main site. I got hammered by Yahoo and lost all rankings. I spent months reviewing my site, getting rid of all those domain forwards, cleaning up every possible setting or old page that could possibly cause me problems. Sometimes you don't even realize something you did is a problem, like doorway pages. They were all the rave back in 2000, everyone was using them. Then at somepoint they became taboo to search engines. Well if you don't keep up with this kind of stuff, you don't know any better to go out and remove/delete all your old pages, etc. Sometimes you may not even link to old pages any more, but they still have them in their cache.

So my advice, review Yahoo's guidelines for what is not acceptable for sites, and do a very thorough investigation on your pages. If you find any potential problems, fix them. Then review your site again. Once you are convinced it is all clean, submit a request for re-review to Yahoo. It may take some persistence, but they will review your situation. Be sure to explain (truthfully) what you found wrong with your site and how you fixed it. They can be sympathetic for folks who made honest mistakes.

Good luck!

[abacuss]

maximillianos pointed out rightly .. if you make a honest confession stating what mistakes you had done and how you rectified them, chances are there that you may be reincluded.

One more thing you have to take care is to update your content, yahoo does not like a doamin having the same content for many years.