Penalty at Yahoo but not Google or Inktomi

[Marcia]

I'm still seeing Google results at Yahoo, but one site I'm seriously looking at that's still doing fine at Google (and Inktomi, too) appears to have incurred a penalty at Yahoo. It isn't a Google penalty and it's not an isolated incident; I just heard of it happening to yet another just today.

Three things come to mind right away that are fairly obvious for the one site I'm looking at in particular:

1. Hidden text
2. Duplicate content
3. Another domain name pointed using a 301 with the same identical links showing up for both domain names.

Are all your sites ranking the same on the two? Is anyone else seeing any sites doing fine at Google but buried at Yahoo? If so, any suspicions as to the reason?

[Goanna1]

That it interesting. Have you checked to see if it is present in all the google data centers?

[Marcia]

I haven't checked all of them yet, but the ones so far are still fine.

[allanp73]

Marcia,

Is this the geo positioning problem that I experienced. I noticed that sites hosted or registered in Canada or outside of the US will rank differently. The version of Google I see in Canada shows the in the top ten. However, when I go to Yahoo or use Anonymizer I see that the sites are ranked well out of the top 50. It one of those unfair discriminatory practices of Google.
This could be what is happening to you.

[vbjaeger]

Same issue. The Yahoo results we are showing seem very similiar to -fi, but the rest of the Google data centers all have good results. We went from top 30 in Yahoo to number 159 today in Yahoo.

[Marcia]

Here we go. It's not geotargeting and it isn't Inktomi proper, it's Yahoo doing it.

See this, where Yahoo is using Ink for the local Australia search:

[webmasterworld.com...]

The site I'm looking at sits at #5 in Inktomi pure search. It's around #4 or #5 at Google search proper and AOL.

The bad news about Australia is that that site is buried for local Australia search which is Ink and "search the web" which is Google.

The site reappeared doing OK at the main Yahoo, came up with strange results like when they did that short testing a few months ago. I remember because there was a site at #1 that isn't anyplace else -and isn't now.

Now it's switched back again at main Yahoo. It doesn't look like a Google or an Inktomi penalty, because it's not showing up elsewhere - and it can be seen at both of Yahoo's Australia searches.

It looks like Yahoo is applying different spam filters.

[vbjaeger]

The site I manage, as of this morning (fingers crossed), seems to be back in good standing with Yahoo. I am betting it is just a hickup. We went from top 40, to top 140, then out of Yahoo all together, and then back to top 160, and now top 40 again.

It was a 3 week ride, but appears to be winding down.

[Marcia]

This is what I found - kind of confirmed by checking at Yahoo Australia which is running both Google and Inktomi.

A load of pages were taken from Site_A and also put on Site_B, which is part of a heavily cross-linked closed circle of sites with only one, the first one that went up, having any decent number of inbound links, including an ODP listing. All the others, about 20 in all, have no links but to each other on every single page of all of the sites.

The site templates are entirely different, but once you strip away the template portion of the page that runs through the whole site the content portion of all those pages is identical on both sites down to the last word. And the pages from Site_B (which also looks to be penalized) as well as Site_A both link into the shopping cart at Site_A.

Site_A is in the top 5 at every single search engine, including at Inktomi Pure Search and is now buried for the major keywords at Yahoo - all of them.