Indexed, but not displayed

What does this mean?

[ptietze]

My Inktomi PFI urls disappeared from the Yahoo serps on Sunday. But they still seem to be in the Yahoo index. If I go to Yahoo advanced search and enter a "" (two quotes) in the search text box, and limit the search to my domain name, all my Inktomi PFI pages appear. But if I do a normal Yahoo search on any of the keywords that previously had good position (and still do on MSN and Google), the PFI pages are nowhere to be seen.

My site is in the Yahoo directory, but only comes up if I limit the search to the directory.

[jrs_66]

I've been in a similar situation for months. It seems the yahoo brothers (tim and mike) will not address questions related to this situation. I think you just have to join the ever growing crowd of people waiting to be released from the yahoo black hole.

[ptietze]

If it was an Inktomi penalty, I would have expected to see it before April 15, but since it only just occurred, it would seem to be a penalty for not participating in Site Match.

There are some confounding factors. All the Inktomi PFI pages that now do not display in Yahoo had been shown in Yahoo (and MSN) under domain name "company.com". Yahoo (and MSN) still displays pages for my site under the domain name "formercompany.com". A 301 redirect was set up to redirct "formercompany.com" to company.com more than 1 year ago. Google handled the 301 redirects as expected, but Inktomi (and thus Yahoo and MSN) continued to show the "formercompany.com" urls.

All the PFI pages were submitted to Inktomi under "company.com" and as I said above they displayed as "company.com"

[makemetop]

>it would seem to be a penalty for not participating in Site Match.

No, I don't think so. I'm now upto checking over 50 sites to see if their INK PFI pages are still being listed in Yahoo after the "drop". I've a few more to go, but so far, so good.

This seems to be more indicitive of the "non-crawled by Yahoo, but crawled by Google" syndrome that has been seen in the past.

If you check for all the pages that Yahoo states they have from your domain, some seem to rank and some don't unless you do an extremely obscure exact search. If you do a check to see what pages are included on HotBot (for example) you only see pages that are ranking (including pages with a penalty but in the Yahoo Search DB). Theories are that content from these pages only show up on searches in Yahoo where there are no returns from Yahoo's own DB and they are pulled from some sort of Google backfill. Certainly that seems to be the case on the ones I've tested.

There hasn't been an answer from Tim or Mike on this mystery either :)

301 redirects may be the problem. Yahoo have stated that they are working on correcting a bug with following these correctly.

[ptietze]

Never considered a backfill from Google. I just did a tes that supports that. We just put up a new page, it has only been spidered by the gogglebot. It shows up on Yahoo when I do a search for the exact title, so it must be coming from a Google backfill.

[IITian]

Interesting theory makemetop and I do hope this is the case instead of some large-scale manual editing. Matches will my observations but why will they use G's backfill when the weights given to it is so low that it hardly show up in the serps?

This brings us to the issue of sitematch again. As I understand Y's crawlers are crawling those paying sites at least once in 48 hours but on other hand it is so resources-starved that other sites are not getting crawled over months. Seeing this more people are going to join sitematch, making the situation worse for non-paying sites.

[steveb]

This was posted about quite a while ago. Muck around with searches for the domain name (site.com)and these Google results show up. Frustrating to see domains fully indexed this way, but unable to find pages via search, but the actual Yahoo index needs to just catch up.

[jrs_66]

My indexed Yahoo pages are certainly not from Google backfill, they are quite different.

Also, the yahoo spider hits my site daily very heavily.

Yahoo Mike- Should I wait, or should I take further action in canabalizing our site?

The black hole continues.

[ptietze]

An update on the message that began this thread.

My Inktomi PFI pages are again being displayed in Yahoo (out on Sunday, back on Tuesday). However, the pages are now being displayed with "formercompany.com" instead of "company.com" in the url. (Recall "formercompany.com was 301 redirected to "company.com".)

[crobb305]

ptietze,

You aren't alone. The Yahoo drama is affecting many folks here. Top listings for one of my sites disappeared Sunday after 2 years in Yahoo. We have been told over and over that sites that are "Found" by the free crawler will remain. I guess the "Free Crawler" is unable to see sites listed in it's own (Yahoo's) directory.