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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
My own take is that in reality this is a lifetime ban. Tim i recognise a change of policy has taken place and you are letting sites back in which wasnt previously the case. My own take is that first you need to recognise that you are penalised and second you need to be aware of the appeal process. For most people out there who do not frequent forums such as this they would in reality be banned for life.
With any Arbitrary penalty that judgment can never be made.
With all these past and present Google, Ink and Yahoo Arbitrary Penalties there are many examples of dead dolphins. Proffesional spammers move on by watching and navigating through the waves of floating dolphins.
I have a consumer advocacy site, and it is somewhat too early to say this because of Yahoo's problems with its crawlers, but my site seems to be partially "banned."
Could it be an "old, sleazy" site because it speaks out against a group that spends millions in Y! directory listings and serps promotions and even a new service offered by Yahoo sells its products directly to the consumers? ;)
<added>Checked out Yahoo's service link placed at the top of the serps for one of the products. Couldn't find mention of the safety concerns/ratings. Same with MSN which offers its own service, it mentions safety ratings placed lowest in its second page clickable from the lowest position on the entry page. I guess $ is more important than lives. Talking of 'old, sleazy.')</added>
[edited by: IITian at 11:26 pm (utc) on April 6, 2004]
So much the better that few such sites ever get back in. Likely they'd go back to their old, sleazy ways.
Rather unfair to paint everyone with the same tainted brush don't you think?
Being a witch was once a sin for which one was burned at the stake. Conversely, what was acceptable practice as little as 6 months ago is not acceptable today ... but may once again become acceptable tomorrow.
Who's to say what is sleazy and what isn't anymore. Even the search engines can't make up their minds! As they try this filter or that algo in the newest series of witch hunts, they discover why they may not work as a "blanket resolution" to solve whatever problem they were trying to eradicate.
There are no black hats or white hats ... its all one massive grey area with all of us fumbling around and trying the best we can to make a living.
At one time I thought my site was as clean as a whistle, but it was really tattletale grey "by today's standards". Even the righteous (or self righteous) can be targeted and penalized.
It is only fair that a system be in place for site owners to state their case and possibly find redemption. You may find yourself in the same position some day. I doubt you would be quite as harsh if it was your web site(s) which suddenly got banned!
They put out the message that they will free crawl all sites in time. Sitematch can get you crawled quicker and more frequently. More frequently? I guess a cynic would say then free crawls get spidered less frequently. Now given Yahoo claim to desire the best index for the user how does less frequent free spidering fit in with that? The user is getting stale pages from the free sites and sitematch customers get their updated info into the index quicker with a presumed boost for fresh content.
Well, my experience sofar over several non-commercial sites (even of local scope and just 1-2 backlinks) is that Y Slurp is VERY active in seeking new content, regardless to whether the site pays or not.
Here is an example I had about 1 month ago:
I had a unused test "private" domain (no backlinks that I know about), and I put a copy of parts of a bigger site in it for a couple of days, without having a robots file. Well, before I knew it, Slurp and Googlebot had indexed several hundred pages of local language content (greek). Whereas Google realised it was duplicate content and never showed it in the SERPs (afterall it had PR0), Yahoo started serving the "test stuff" in its SERPs top20, favoring the unlisted site over the "real", original URL, which exists since 1995.
I'm sure Slurp meant well in attempting to find and index new content (which it does VERY actively sofar in my experience, great!), and I should have blocked all robots to the test domain, but this seems to confirm a point that has been made here in the past wrt Yahoo SERPs:
It seems that Y doesn't rely heavily on backlinks or even seems to penalise backlinks?
Is it crawling all free pages with fresh content daily?
Yahoo needs to be working on filters that don't penalize thousands of sites unfairly. Empowering a class of hourly employees whose greatest computer experience was probably with X Box, prior to their present job, is not the route to pursue in reviewing sites. Its an indignity I wouldn't perpetrate upon others except in the singular case to judge the people doing the judging.
>Well, my experience sofar over several non-commercial sites (even of local scope and just 1-2 backlinks) is that Y Slurp is VERY active in seeking new content, regardless to whether the site pays or not.
Is it crawling all free pages with fresh content daily?
Yes, Slurp is very active in all the sites I monitor. Much more active than the recent past. E.g. yesterday it downloaded 160 pages of a 800 page Website.
Even on the "test" site I mentioned above (no backlinks etc), after I put a robots.txt excluding ALL robots, it still downloads the robots.txt every 1-2hr.
I;m not sure though how often those crawled pages get included in the index (ie appear in Y cache). In the recent past, cached pages were more than 1 month old, right now it must be just a few days.
And those stats are for sites that which are nowhere in Y SERPs, except the (undesirable) test site.
So I guess it must be even better for sites which Y likes more.
