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The older your site and the more succesfful it has been the higher the chance of it incurring a Yahoo penalty.
Newer sites are far less likely to trip their algo penalty.
Yahoo's penalty should be called the Too Successful penalty.
Why is it I can get sites high in Yahoo or Google, but never both....?
Now ATW on the other hand used to love all of my sites...
The older your site and the more succesfful it has been the higher the chance of it incurring a Yahoo penalty.
Y! is certainly blowing up sites unfairly, but our (100+) sites disprove any notion that success or age is a problem. There are other factors involved.
What is bothering me is the very long time it takes Y! to index pages (even at a very well-linked-to-site), and how long it takes Y! to update info on specific pages (if you're not paying). In this regard, G is miles ahead. And Y probably won't fix this, since doing so would eliminate any reason to pay, expect for the feeds.
The largest and most authoritative site in my industry, with over 25,000 companies who utilize the site to promote their products has of this week been penalized by Yahoo and can no longer be found in the index.
Perhaps though the reason you are still in the index is that you operate over 100 sites. I would venture that not one of your sites come close to the size of the site I am referring to, has as many links pointing to it, or has the traffic that this one site I am referring too.
With 100 sites you essentially have created a business model where none of your sites trigger Yahoo's algo penalty.
Also I did not say that none of our sites have been hit by Y! I was suggesting merely that there is ample evidence that being large and successful and around for a while does not necessarily hurt you with Y!
Aside from several very large sites that we operate, there are, of course, thousands of large successful sites that were not hit by Y!. That fact that yours was penalized does not have to do with size or success per se. Whether you were penalized unfairly or not I have no idea, but you would not be the first if you were penalized unfairly. It has happened to sites of all shapes and sizes and ages.
We have thousands of pages of content. It has incoming links from hundreds or maybe thousands of sites that point to it, including federal government sites, nationally read magazine and newspaper sites,small niche sites, etc. People recommend it to each other by name online and off.
But you can't find it in Yahoo since March 18 or so.
So much for big sites being automaticallly included. We were there in February, but someone/some thing decided we were in violation of some unknown rule.
All you can find if you type in the name of our site are things that ARE link farms (which we don't participate in) and the many sites that point to us.
The only thing I can think of is that we had set up my name and a common misspelling of our domain name as aliases (just something that the dns pointed to the main site). Position Tech, when I asked them why our sites had been dropped (I have two that have been droped) said I had duplicate content. So we got rid of the pointers. One we made 301 permanent redirect . The other isn't there at all any more.
Position tech claims sites get respidered every 48 hours, but that hasn't helped. While I know position tech, without buying sitematch isn't going to get us into Yahoo, our subscription hasn't run out and we don't show up in anything else Inktomi sends results to either.
Having 100 plus sites obviously increases your chance of being in the SERPs.
Like you I manage numerous sites though they are for other people. The smaller sites I manage for clients are doing well in Yahoo's results. The only difference, aside from content, between these sites and my own site, which has been penalized by Yaoo, is the size and number of cross links.
Certainly not all large sites are penalized. There is no way Yahoo is going to penalize sites such as Amazon, EBAY etc.
Though based on the reasons provided to us by Yahoo one wonders why these well known sites wouldnt fall within Yahoo's penalty since most have duplicate content all over the web.
In specific industries though, Yahoo is penalizing the most successful privately owned sites. Certainly they can't get away with totally removing every large commercial site in these industries from their index as then their search becomes almost worthless.
And it is only natural that after years of work these sites have plenty of cross links with other sites, and they also have their content presented on other sites through various types of alliances. Search engine algos aside, both cross links, and content sharing are legitimate online business strategies used by many webmasters to grow their businesses.
It is possible that these factors combined with specific industry targeting are Yahoo's reasons for removing great sites from their index. If the case, then Yahoo's algo is flawed, since those 2 reasons do not devalue the high level of unique content that these sites present.
In fact, in my own industry, a site that was voted Forbes Best of the Web in 2003 has been penalized. Seems like the editors from Forbes who hand picked this site would have a better grasp of content value than a high strung search engine algo.
What is bothering me is the very long time it takes Y! to index pages (even at a very well-linked-to-site), and how long it takes Y! to update info on specific pages (if you're not paying).
This bothers me as well! And anyone else I suppose.
Has Yahoo! a Google-like refesh cycle? Google updates every about 30-40 days for the major index, and then there is the freshbot. What about Yahoo!? Has it a stable pattern of updates or is it irregular?
I really am new to this forum and don't want to get caught up in the frustration about Google and Yahoo. I know from experience it just takes patience.
I too however would like to know the refresh pattern of Yahoo. I was all for Google but it seems easier to optimize for Yahoo. I know that Google (like others have said) does a deep crawl every 30 days and you must wait until then to see a change in ranking. The date change next to the listings show that google does a refresh of the pages everyday but I tend to think it's on a schedule. You'll notice that the date will change for maybe or week and then stay the same. At that time the other sites that weren't changed will then start to be updated daily. I still don't know the benefit a person's site will reap because of this. Maybe it's just the cache that's updated. I do know and will stand by it that these little refreshes don't help ranking. THe deep crawl does.
I'm now interested in Yahoo not Google. I'm wanting to know the schedule for Yahoo's refresh and I haven't really seen any solid facts. If I have to learn it myself I will and will share it with everyone but I know someone has got to have studied it. I wish you all the best of luck on Yahoo and Google.
Michel Tremblay
We launched a new product / site last week, and today it is # 3 for its primary keywords.
I've yet to pay a cent for sitematch.
Honestly I like Yahoo's "freshbot" better than Google - it's faster and easier to rank.
DO you think that the "freshbot" really matters when it comes to your ranking on Google? I don't know about Yahoo but from experience with Google it doesn't help your ranking. Google even states themselves that they only re-index every 4 weeks. The freshbot doesn't re-index your site. I'm not to sure about this but this is my theory. The freshbot on Google updates the cache which is just a snapshot of when it was last crawled. So if your title has changed or it will reflect in the title. However, since Google only re-indexes every month your ranking won't change because Google ranks accourding to what's already in the index. The cache of your page may change but Google's database still holds your information from the last index and will still rank you accourding to it. Your title alone cannot change your ranking.
I have a site which i was optimizing for Google a while ago and I completely reoptimized it by changing title,text,meta, and everything else. I expected the next day that when that freshbot saw the changes my site would either move down or up. It stayed just where it was. So I couldn't figure it out. I think this may prove my theory but maybe not. I don't really know. Some feedback on that would be good so that I can get a confirmation or still for the answer.
As for Yahoo, I'm never going to use the SiteMatch thing. I'm going the free way and hope to see my way to the top. I would like to know if anyone knows the schedule if there is one to Yahoo refreshing the pages, and does Yahoo's refresh accually help your ranking? How often do they re-index? I have other questions I post somewhere else where it's relevant to the topic. Please give your feedback.
Mike Tremblay
? Yahoo! has a FRESHbot?
