Big problem with Yahoo

redirecting links cause sites to be dropped

[allanp73]

I noticed a real big problem with Yahoo. This is one that should be looked at asap. I hope Tim is listening. My sites used to be well ranked on Yahoo and as a proud webmaster I checked my ranks from time to time. Today the sites were gone. However, they weren't completely gone. I noticed that they were replaced by directory sites redirect links to my sites.
ex. www.directorydomain.com/cgi-bin/customermail.cgi?mess=real&name=
These links go directly to my site but through another domain. Yahoo doesn't seem to recognize these as links and instead thinks of them as the direct URL of the websites. Because I got links from many directories who use this type of linking technique many of my domains are dropped.
These are major directories linking to me in this manner and they link to thousands of sites which are too being affected. This means there is a very serious problem with Yahoo.
Basically if you want to be unscrupulous you could just link (using one of these crazy links) to the top ranked sites and steal their positioning.
I hope this problem can get resolved. I am not quite sure how to proceed. It is not really the directories fault, but right now they are causing a severe loss of business for me. Yahoo has Achilles's heel which has an arrow sticking out of it.

HELP!

[Robert Charlton]

These links go directly to my site but through another domain. Yahoo doesn't seem to recognize these as links and instead thinks of them as the direct URL of the websites. Because I got links from many directories who use this type of linking technique many of my domains are dropped.

allan - Check out my msg #11 on this thread...

More Yahoo Q&A
[webmasterworld.com...]

...asking Yahoo_Mike the same question. Check out the other threads it links to. Does all this look familiar?

The silence on this situation, both from Yahoo and Google, is deafening.

[hamster77]

Yup same thing here - I've had my main site replaced by a redirect from a directory since the New Yahoo appeared. It changed to the real url for a couple of days after 15th April and now it's back to the redirect again - and well down the serps. Funnily enough this site doesn't get many visitors from Yahoo...

[Freedom]

Wow, Yahoo_Mike sure ducked that question. Guess the technical ability to solve this problem is way beyond their skill.

Not surprised.

Maybe they could hire some of Google or Ask Jeeves people to come over and fix it for them.

[seasalt]

They have stated a while ago that they have known about this problem. But the fix has gone from a "weeks" to "months" scenario. It seems odd that they have't implemented a fix yet. All other major engines handle redirects just fine - including Yahoo! supplied MSN. Get on the stick, boys!

seasalt

[allanp73]

This problem just appeared for me the in the last few days. I imagine it was due Yahoo finally getting around to indexing these directory sites. Is there anyway to correct the problem. I really don't want to tell these good sites to stop linking to me, but already I am feeling the effects. One site went from 1000+ unique visitors per day to less than 100.
This situation could put my business out of business.

[allanp73]

Seasalt,

"All other major engines handle redirects just fine - including Yahoo! supplied MSN."

Still my rankings are being killed on MSN too. The same problem causes problems there too because the rankings on Yahoo are used for these sites. Because my sites are effective dropped they don't show on MSN either.

[crobb305]

This was discussed in the following thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Yahoo_Mike says the mirrors/redirects will not hurt a site's rankings. I have my doubts because why would Yahoo want hundreds of mirrors/redirects to same site? There are dozens of mirror urls to my site in Yahoo also, and my site has coincidentally vanished from the serps.

[seasalt]

Still my rankings are being killed on MSN too.

My rankings were killed on MSN but have recently come back - better than before. So I can't figure out why they can get it right for one set of data and not the other (or in your current case and my former case, neither).

All the redirects rank higher than my actual site in Yahoo! No sign of the redirects in MSN now for me.

I'm not a programming wiz, but it does not seem that it should be that complicated of a task to fix this problem; months, for a problem they have known about even longer.

seasalt

[allanp73]

For the redirects don't rank as well. I was #1 for major terms, now the redirects to my site are ranked about around #6. The problem is the only way to access my site via Yahoo search is through one of these silly redirects. I can't understand why Yahoo would choose the redirect link over the actual URL.

[crobb305]

allanp73,

I am having the exact same problem. My site has been so heavily penalized in Yahoo (I believe partly because of these redirects that I have no control over) that I do not show up on any search terms. But, I still get 1% of my traffic from Yahoo via these silly redirects/mirrors. I am finding more and more of these url's everyday. Pretty soon, there will be no original websites in Yahoo since the originals will all be banned. There will only be redirects. Ridiculous.

[allanp73]

I can actually show major search terms that are almost completely redirecting links. The problem reminds me of the movie the Matrix. This is the case where agent Smith has grown out of Yahoo's control.

I had hoped that Yahoo would be able to mount a serious challange against Google, but this really undermines its credibility.

[ogletree]

I have several old domains that I have not done anything with so I have them redirected to my main site. Google has never had a problem with this. They have no backlinks and the main site has many. I have found several places where these parked redirect domains rank better than the main site. This makes no since. Yahoo is broken. They need to fix their dup filter.

[crobb305]

When I run a search for my site title in quotes, there are about 20 redirect urls that appear. My website, which is the original, appears at the bottom because of the penalty. Yahoo should be able to see which urls were indexed first. URLs that come along later with duplicate content should not be able to rank higher.

[allanp73]

Actually, I feel really bad at first I thought the site that used the redirecting link was trying to hijack my site. I wrote them that they should modify the link or completely remove it. (I don't think I sounded too nice though). Later I noticed that it wasn't just this site but dozens of other directories.
The effect has been brutal and has left me (and I imagine others) with no course of action. We suffer because we developed good sites that people link to.

[steveb]

"I can't understand why Yahoo would choose the redirect link over the actual URL."

This has been a huge problem with yahoo from the beginning and they can only say so many times that they are trying to fix it. There are at least fifty threads on this. It's a disasterous issue for them so it will be fixed when it can be fixed.

[helenp]

Well,
I had an directory with more info from alexa on their site to eliminate my listings, to see what happens.
though that link gives an strange indexing and url.
On top searching for my companyname there is an url like this:
www.alexa.com/data/details?amzn_id=directory-20&url=http%3A//www.mycompanyname.com

and just had an very strange hit from yahoo images,
so I went to images, wrote very special world for an image of mine, it came up in yahoo images with my url correctly, but when making click on it............

there was an redirection to url of my site similar as above (%3a) like this:
http%3a//www.mycompanyname.com/folder/city_info.htm
of course, gave an error 404, which was redirected to my homepage.

so seems like my site is indexed by yahoo as http%3a//www.mycompanyname.com

If not, this is very strange,
Seen several sites indexed in that directory excluded from yahoo search, but not all.....strange things

[WebGuerrilla]

For what it's worth, I do know that this issue is being given top priority by Y!. Not only does the redirect issue impact the quality of the db, it also is causing them to be buried with email from site owners who think they have been banned.

I understand not wanting to talk about technical problems in public, but keeping quite seems to be causing a much bigger PR problem by causing so many webmasters to come to the conclusion that they have been banned for no legitimate reason.

So which would you chose? Admit that you are technically inept, or allow everyone to think you are cruel and cold-hearted?

[crobb305]

Until they come up with a permanent fix, they should devise something temporary to bring our rankings back. Seems like they could determine which url was indexed first and assume it is the original one. Rank it higher. There is no excuse for new urls that redirect to my site ranking higher than the real/original url which has been indexed in Yahoo for years.

Here's an idea: if there are duplicate-content url's and one of them is listed in the Yahoo Directory, then allow only the one that is in the yahoo directory to show in the serps. Penalize the others. It seems silly that my site's rankings have plummeted, while redirects rise to the top. My site is listed in the directory and those url's are not.

C

[edited by: crobb305 at 9:50 pm (utc) on April 30, 2004]

[allanp73]

Google had the same problem with redirecting links a few months ago and they seem to have it under control now. So there must be a solution. Yahoo should contact their old partner and hopefully then the problem can get fixed.
I was wondering if I resubmit the sites to Yahoo if it would drop the redirect URL for the real URL.
Between Yahoo screw-ups and Google algo issues I feel very left out.

[tictoc]

I hope Yahoo does something about this soon - I am experiencing this same issue and there is nothing that bugs me more than clicking on a link and being taken somewhere else unrelated from what it says in the serps. It would be nice to hear Tim or Mike address this issue and what they are doing about it.

[sid560]

Same here. It is funny and gut wrenching to see all the redirects coming up when searching on my domain name. Here I am trying everything possible to guess the Yahoo penalty and some jerky redirect sites taking my place.

Yahoo, please help!

[helenp]

well, I spoked to quickly.......

actually yahoo is giving all images with that odd http%3a redirection..... they changed something in their database for images, gives a lot of redirections in your logfile............

anyway my first listing for my company is still wery odd and strange.....

[crobb305]

I don't understand why Yahoo_Mike said that the redirects won't harm a site's ranking in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

It seems many webmasters have expressed similar problems here. Maybe I misunderstood him.

[Robert Charlton]

I don't understand why Yahoo_Mike said that the redirects won't harm a site's ranking in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

As I read Yahoo_Mike's answer on that thread, he's saying that the page was not redirected, but rather that somebody had put it in a frame... not the same thing at all.

There are lots of threads on the forum about using javascript to break out of frames. Here's one...

External Frame Breaking
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

Maybe they could hire some of Google or Ask Jeeves people to come over and fix it for them.

I had hoped that Yahoo would be able to mount a serious challange against Google, but this really undermines its credibility.

Google, in fact, has this problem in a big way also.

From my post on the Yahoo_Mike Q&A thread:

The big recent discussion on the problem is this thread, which applies to Yahoo too:

Meta Refresh leads to ...
... Replacement of the target URL!
[webmasterworld.com...]

I should add, when I say "this problem" that I'm not sure that everybody's talking about the same problem....

I think some folks may be talking about sites redirected by 301s, and others are talking about directory or affiliate link redirect click counting pages, which seem to use a combination of 302s and meta refresh redirects. That's what I'm talking about.

And, as in the post in [webmasterworld.com...] , I think some posters are talking about problems that aren't redirects at all.

[Robert Charlton]

For what it's worth, I do know that this issue is being given top priority by Y!.

WebGuerrilla - That's good news. Do you know if Google is also addressing the problem?

Also, as I mention above, what kind of redirects are we actually talking about? Inktomi had always been slow on 301s, eg, but they were second best after Google. I'm not up on how they handle 302s at all.

The redirects that have affected me are all click counting pages with meta refresh redirects, but I think they were all combined with 302s.

On the meta refresh part of this, which I'm theorizing is at least part of the problem, I still don't get why they just don't decide to treat meta refreshes within the same domain as they do now... which would take care of both splash pages and meta refresh doorway pages... but not let meta refresh redirect links take over when you jump to a different domain. For some reason, this seems too easy, and I'm thinking I must be oversimplifying the problem.

Incidentally, I first saw this problem in Google last July, and talked to Google people about it at SES in August. I first noticed the problem on Inktomi in late December or early January. And now this thread confirms sightings in the new Yahoo.

[crobb305]

This problem is so big that I think this thread deserves a spot on the webmasterworld home page ;)

C

[Freedom]

I've never seen or noticed this problems with Google.

[dhatz]

I have several old domains that I have not done anything with so I have them redirected to my main site. Google has never had a problem with this. They have no backlinks and the main site has many. I have found several places where these parked redirect domains rank better than the main site. This makes no since. Yahoo is broken. They need to fix their dup filter.

Same here.

It seems there are some glitches in Yahoo's algo:

I had registered variation of the main domain (to prevent potential abuse). It had a 301 redirect to the main domain and infact had a URL / "Identified-URL" and various similar (non-standard, I know) meta directives pointing to the "real" URL, EVER SINCE IT WAS ESTABLISHED (easily proveable via archive.org)

The secondary domain had no "real" backlinks (jsut 4 from "whitepages" directories, ie pages that alphabetically list EVERY domain in the country).

The primary domain had hundreds of backlinks (thousands if we count internal ones), incl Dmoz, Yahoo dir, PR6 etc etc etc.

Yet, Yahoo seems to have picked up the "private" URL and shows that in the SERPs instead.

I'm pretty sure that the "primary domain" has a penalty, because despite all its backlinks (Yahoo Dir, dmoz, 100s of independant sites yada yada) when I look for the site's title, it comes LAST in the SERPs, after the "private domain" URLs. And the date-stamp on the cached page is 27-Jan-2004.

On the other hand, Slurp is just as active as Googlebot on the site every day, requesting pages via the "private" URLs, getting 301 redirected and fetching the page successfully.