Site Dropped From Yahoo

[JoeyBall]

Hi,

My sites use to rank very good on yahoo, no.1 and no.8 but last week they dissapeared from the yahoo, I haven't got a clue why.

The sites have also gone on www.msn.com both sites dissapeared on both search engines sounds a bit dodgy.

Can anyone give me some advice I

[soapystar]

mfishy
you are so right. The problem here is that sites are not being reviewed by people with no knowledge of that specific topic or knowledge of other sites on the same topic. For this reason they cannot tell unique content from database pulls. The cannot see what provides useful information from sites that dont. They just see you run an affiliate travel site and look down on you. And yes look at their own site. And they are banning us for life. If what has been said about me was true i would not have a base or repeat customers.

[edited by: soapystar at 5:26 pm (utc) on April 3, 2004]

[upstater]

We also have all but disappeared from Yahoo, after many months of getting thousands of referrals a day.

My suspicion, after various test searches, is that Yahoo is blocking sites that run Google Adsense advertisements.

For example, we tried a search for "Fayette Art Museum."

In the top 10 results, Google returned 7 sites that do not run Google ads and 3 sites (including ours) that do. Yahoo returned 9 sites that do not run Google ads and one site that does (although it appears that this may be an old page on a site that no longer runs Google ads).

I suspect that the key for the Yahoo search is whether a site references Google ads in its robots.txt file. None of the sites returned by Yahoo in this sample search do so. Our experience, as noted by other forum posters, has been that the Yahoo Slurp hits our robots.txt file several times a day, but goes no further.

I have no idea if this constitutes restraint of trade in the freewheeling world of the web, but it is certainly a dramatic skewing of results. Yahoo should own up to it, if this is the new policy.

[soapystar]

well if searchking had grounds against google for demoting their pr directly then a lot of sites will have grounds on a subjective lifetime ban.

[Tim]

Upstater,
We are not doing anything to look for adsense. Many people that run adsense tend to violate our content guidelines via overoptimization. It would be silly to demote valuable content because it has adsense links. On the other hand why dont you ask Google if they are promoting sites with adsense. That sounds like a worthwhile conspiracy theory to investigate...That could be the hypothesis that your test proves also.
Tim

[Tim]

mfishy,
I am not singling out affiliates- that was a descriptor of the type of spam it was. I was referring to the overoptimization part. It is too difficult to discuss the site when both of us have not seen it.
Tim

[Tim]

Soapystar,
Whilst the "lifetime ban" may have been true with Inktomi. We have updated our policies and are letting sites back into the index that have cleaned up their act.
Tim

[upstater]

Tim,

Our site is extremely rich in content and doesn't engage in link swapping, spamming or multiple domain names running the same content.

I have watched Google to see if they promote sites running AdSense, and our experience has been that we haven't fared better or worse. We actually joined the program fairly late in the game and enjoyed high rankings long before we began running ads. Yahoo, on the other hand, appeared to drop us overnight, for reasons unknown (and, unlike Google, has failed to answer emails).

[edited by: upstater at 6:04 pm (utc) on April 3, 2004]

[Tim]

Upstater,
Please remove the domain from your post. Stickymail in the future. Can you please send this request to the webmasterworldfeedback address and someone will look at it.
Thanks,
Tim

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes folks - please take any specific problem up through appropriate channels with Yahoo themselves.

(we aren't the yahoo customer support mech here...)