Forum Moderators: open
Basically, lots of my domains have dissappeared
from the Yahoo search engine. Here is what I have
noticed:
1. Yahoo Slurp stopped visiting my website around
the 27th or 28th of this month.
2. My daily traffic has dropped from around 2,000
uniques, to around 100. Yahoo has sent me less than
20 visitors a day, since the 27th. My last visitor
from Yahoo arrived today, so I seem to be getting
visitors through Yahoo, even though I cannot see
my webpages in their index anymore.
3. The domains in questions, were heavily cross
linked, and contained index pages with thousands
of links, going to pages that used PHP code to
simply redirect the visitor. (I realise this is
not good SEO practice etc).
So, with all this in mind. Have I been penalised,
or is Yahoo preparing to do a serious update? Has
anyone else noticed that Yahoo slurp is being lazy
over the last few days? Has anyone else experienced
a dramatic loss in traffic, and page rank listings?
I really appreciate the fact that you have read this
post. Hopefully someone can set me straight, so I do
not have to drink as much coffee.
Thank you.
Jonathan
Finally that bot keeps crawling. I have been waiting for it for a long time and since about last week that bot is hungry.
At current moment quite close behind googlebot :)
The domains in questions, were heavily cross
linked, and contained index pages with thousands
of links
LOL. Yep, as otech said, you may have answered your own question.
thousands of link in ONE page?
So either Y has a major bug that they have not fixed yet.
A competitor’s SEO has submitted my site without the www and a bug in yahoo searches for that domain first, or yahoo has SEO’s working internally and changing the database for their clients.
Those are the only 3 ways it could happen. See this…
[webmasterworld.com...]
msg #:15
So if you want to screw you competitors, apparently you can just submit their site to yahoo w/o the www.
After almost 30 days, the problem is still there. Either (Y) doesn’t care about how their SE can be manipulated or they don’t care if they have a bug, or they are NOT capable of fixing it. Probably the latter. (if they would get some real talent, then this problem would not have existed in the first place. What do they have, spaghetti code?)
The fact is that after I complained the first time, they deleted the URL w/o the www and presto-chango, I was back in, so this is the problem
I mean this is like a SE 101 problem. Their stock was up today, time to inform some analysis of what a big JR. mistake this is.
Apparently somewhere on the net someone has linked to an obscure page we have to update software, no doubt hoping it would not be found. Obviously a SEO did this. I know this because (G) shows that page in their SERP as well, but I had to dig to find it and I cannot find the page with the link, but it is in both (G) and (Y). Why is it that (G) knows how to handle such a JR problem and (Y) doesn’t?
Google refers tons of traffic using around 15,000 different search phrases a month. Obviously the most popular ones appear in the first 10.
Yahoo has the very same pages indexed:
[ficticious domain]
[search.yahoo.com...]
Yet when I search at Yahoo using any of the very same phrases, I appear nowhere in the first 100.
Got me baffled?
Had a feeling this may happen when Yahoo first released their search results. Many people were applauding on WW how great they were.
Yahoo are a 100% commercial web portal, they couldn't care less about the small guy trying to make a living. They want it all. After them buying Kelkoo I've noticed any similar free submission sites have been wiped out. Websites which do very well on Google.
To sum it up
- Google is the small commercial webmasters friend (they do sometimes mess it up, but their hearts in the right place)
- Yahoo is the small commercial webmasters enemy
webmasterworldfeedback@yahoo.com
and ask Yahoo if they have found your site or pages to be spammy. I did and received an answer within a couple weeks.
>>>
It has been determined that your site does not comply with Yahoo!'s
Content Policy Guidelines located at:
[help.yahoo.com...]
<<<
The thing is that you can know for sure, try to do some cleanup and then draft another e-mail to them explaining anything that might be a misconception.
I don't think I would do this unless I was sure my site had been cleaned up. But the fact that a human being will review your message at least provides you with the opportunity of explaining why your site should be included in the database.
Sorry, no reply from Yahoo support and neither have the representatives celebrating the "improved Yahoo search features" taken the time to discuss the penalty case in this forum.
With my problem, the site is there, just the www removed. There is someone out there that has a link to our site w/o the www. SERPs show in (Y) and (G). If bad site were a problem, why would they just remove the www? They have some Jr. programming problems and are very slow to correct them. Anything else and I’m sure they would have just removed the site, or at least would have the site consistent. (with or without the www)
This tells me that they are slow in handling all problems. Based on others having problems that have paid them, tells me that they better get with it or start to see market share disappear. And this is not the time to show that they can’t handle problems, especially such Jr. SE problems, in a timely manner. I’ve lost all respect for them, and I’m sure others will as well sooner that later.
If they are trying to force people to pay them by removing them from the SERPs, it will not work. They aren't the biggest dog anymore and ticking off potential customers never works.
bbonline, I agree you don't get a specific reply and I think this is deliberate. They likely figure that if you get a penalty, you know what you did wrong. If they spell the problem out too clearly, maybe they think they give you an advantage. All these SEs think all the websites out there are super-sophisticated SEO types. I know that's not true with me. I'm not entirely certain what I did to offend them.
And yes there are some junior programming problems out there but I don't think that is limited to just Y. The same can be said of G from time to time and I'm sure others as well.
