Yahoo Directory Is Killing Me

Well, maybe not literally, but is killing 100% of my Yahoo traffic

[Rollo]

Well, how should I begin? My website was, to be kind, under performing in Yahoo and MSN relative to Google. I was getting upwards of 85% of traffic from Google so last week I decided to re-optimize my pages in a more Yahoo friendly content-oriented way. I managed to get listed in DMOZ and all was going very well....

Then I submitted my site to Yahoo directory. My Yahoo traffic absolutely disappeared. I mean I have ZERO. My site is over 100 pages and all but the index page are gone. In my case, it's the sub pages that are the key to my business. To add insult to injury, I paid $299 for the pleasure of losing all my traffic.

I can't believe a company as savvy as Yahoo would create such a disincentive for listing in their directory so I'm hoping that if I am patient, Yahoo will index my sub pages and not only list the main page with the lousy title and description written by the Yahoo staff.

If this is not the case, how can I gently and inconspicuously get my site unlisted?

Any wisdom would be much appreciated.

Thanks all,

Rollo

[steveb]

The Directory title might impact your main page, but being listed in the Directory has zero impact on subpages.

[bobothecat]

... and helps as a link from a 'good neighborhood' .

[Rollo]

Thanks, then there is hope. Why then did all of my subpages disappear? I really don't care about the homepage title, but the rest of the pages are seriously GONE. Is this normal? Just a temporary dislocation?

[Robert Charlton]

Rollo - steveb and bobothecat are right about the subpages. The Yahoo directory listing should not affect them, and in fact it should help.

I've been screaming about the Yahoo titles for several years, and I do feel the titles cost traffic.

New SERPS Use Shorter Directory Description
Much Less Desirable - Disincentive for Directory
[webmasterworld.com...]

You mentioned reoptimizing your pages. Did the new versions rank at all in Yahoo before you submitted to the directory? It could be that whatever you did wasn't as Yahoo-friendly as you thought. Did you change anything besides page content?

[Rollo]

Hi Robert,

Actually yes, I had many top ten listings for some competative keywords and many more for not so competative keywords before listing my site. When I re-optimized I just added instances of targeted keywords to the body to bring the % up, nothing spammy. Nothing to cause this.

I thought a directory listing would help as well, that's why I was shocked when my traffic died. I still can't beleive it. I'm hoping it's just a temporary translation.

What happens is this, I'll type in a keyword where I was formally in the top 10 and the name of the company. This normally would produce two pages in the SERPs, the optimized page and the title page. Instead, now the title page comes up and shows the highlighted keyword that is the link to the optimized page in the description, but the optimized page is nowhere to be found. This is the case for all subpages. Only the tilte page comes up.

My traffic stats are pretty clear, Yahoo is all but done except for the odd hit to the poorly optimized homepage.

HAve you ever heard of something like this happeneing? What was done to resolve it?

Thanks,

Rollo

[IITian]

Why not de-optimize your site by uploading your backup of your old site?

[Rollo]

That's a good sugesstion. Actually I already had a couple "control" pages that I did not optimize and they are gone too.

[bobothecat]

Rollo,

One thing I didn't see mentioned was how long ago it was that you got the paid directory listing... if it was fairly recent - one thing that comes to mind is that Yahoo may be waiting to do a re-crawl of your site.

If it's been 30 days or less, I'd give it some time... as I have several sites with paid listings in the directory, and have no problem with getting sub-pages listed ( with good rankings ) - though they've all been in the directory for 1-5 years now, so guess it wouldn't be fair to use that as a variable 'yet'.

[Rollo]

Thanks... I'm figuring that it's some sort of anomoly that will correct itself given time. Maybe it does just need to be recrawled. The listing was fairly recent. It's been less than two weeks. I'm hoping that's it... I'll let yall know.

I've gotten a few mails saying that this was to be expected and the Yahoo Dir is bad news but I'm inclined to beleive any Yahoo strategist that would penazlie someone for handing them $300 wouldn't be around long, so it seems to defy economic logic.

Just out of curiosity, at what point does keyword padding become spam? At what point does it fail to clear the bar... if there is such a "bar." I was aiming for about 1 in 20 words or about 5% during optimization.

Thanks