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Thanks,
Your post gave me an idea. How about creating a new site just for yahoo? You could do a couple things (that I can think of) to stop other search engines from indexing your "Yahoo Only" site:
1) A robot.txt file that informs Yahoo to index everything and tell all other engines to NOT index the site.
2) You could write a little php to detect if it's a Yahoo bot - if so, the php script can allow the page to be displayed - if it's any other bot or user, you could do a 301 redirect to your current site.
#2 is basically in place for search engines that don't follow the robot.txt directives.
I'm sure there are many other ideas out there on how to do this... but I think you may have something with creating a new site.
Regarding your comment:
Should I look at getting a Yahoo ban as just a cost of doing business?At this point it doesn't seem like it could get worse with Yahoo. If you're currently not getting any traffic from them - then doing something is better than doing nothing.
In my case, I've never been listed in Yahoo after 3 years of trying. If I could get a SINGLE page to come up in Yahoo I would love it!
I think I am going to give this idea a try with a "Yahoo Only" site. I'll wait to see what others think first - as I've seen some great ideas come out on these boards! :-)
In practice you may want to consider;
1)That if your new site has very similar content to other existing sites then your competitors could easily turn you in as before. So unless you delete all your others sites you may be back where you started.
I am talking about duplicate sites/content here which seems to be where most people are falling foul.
2)If we asume that link popularity plays a part on Yahoo! then it may take you a year to get good (natural) link pop back again. I lot can happen in a year.
3)You might want to bide your time and concentrate on the new MSN search and forget about Yahoo!. They are not playing the game with us why should we waste our time with them.
It is difficult to describe what it is - a ban, a penalty, or something else. What I do know is that if I search for www.mydomainname.com, my site doesn't come up. I like my site and have spend a lot of time on it and it is currently popular, so I don't want to get rid of it. It sounds like the robots.txt option to disallow all other bots may be the way to go if I do go ahead and build another site. Then maybe on the old site, I could disallow the Yahoo bots since the site is already banned. Would that prevent the duplicate content problem? I would like to ignore Yahoo, believe me I would, but Yahoo is a large player. If Google and MSN would increase marketshare, great. But until that day comes, I need to pay attention to Yahoo.
Hmmmmm.... now that I just wrote that, I see one major flaw! The human factor @ Yahoo. If they happened to personally visit the site... they will see it is being redirected... a no no with Yahoo. If it wasn't for the human factor...the idea may have worked.
How much traffic were Yahoo actually sending you in comparison to other engines? After they dropped my site I managed to aquire some decent links from large sites which between them have pretty much replaced the stream (more of a drip) of traffic I received from Yahoo. Building a new site just for Yahoo seems a bit extreme, especially considering the traffic they supply could likely take a knock when Bill's search engine is launched.
I'd advise you to carry on with your site without them, look for other traffic sources. Don't give their "support" team the satisfaction of sending you crytic, anonymous emails like they did to me.
The ironic part of all this is that just like we need Yahoo to deliver content, Yahoo needs to deliver high quality relevant results to remain a search engine people use. In our industry, out of the top 10, four of those results are now people operating with no staff, on a shared server out of their bedroom with virtually no content. There's nothing wrong with operating out of a bedroom, after all, that's how we started. With the heavy equipment that we sell however, it is simply impossible to stock the items and provide service, parts, research, etc. in this environment which is expected nowadays in our industry.
I've sent Yahoo various e-mails, letters, etc. but haven't heard anything back. We have tens of thousands of routine customers so the 'penalty' certainly hasn't made a big dent in the business, but it is still annoying. I e-mailed Yahoo_Mike about a month and a half ago and he told me he would look into the situation. I've sent a few follow-up e-mails but haven't received any response. It is my genuine hope that just like all of the rest of us, Yahoo_Mike is busy with his everyday responsibilities and is going to help to make this situation right in good time. I'm keeping the faith and really hoping that he'll come through since I feel Yahoo would benefit from our content for searches in our industry.
Keep positive and I hope that your situation works out as well.
BPPilot
Dupe the site on a new domain, ban the other bots, and serve it up.
Yes, always busy cept when Yahoo adds a new service and he and others can drum up some fresh cash.
Build a new domain, the old one will not get it if it was really penalized in the first place.
Good luck
Don't submit it to Yahoo.
Just let their robot find it.
As I pointed out previously, Y! talks big and tries to convince everyone (including themselves) that they're still a player, but they truly aren't worth the effort of redesigning for, at the risk of losing Google rank. When was the last time you heard someone say "I Yahoo-ed for [a term]" vs. "I Googled it"? When Y! were using Google results (exact same ranks for every search) a while back, we tracked it and found we were getting less than 30% of the traffic from Y! as from G. Which obviously translates to a small fraction of the overall searches even now.
Tweb: [They won't be going out of business, so don't worry about that]
Are you laying odds on this ;) I might be willing to bite. From my prior predictions, they've got maybe another 9 months in the search biz... I'd sell the stock short, but I think they might actually be smart (lucky) enough to be planning a quick morph real soon into a different profitable business area away from internet search.
Mike
BP
Yeah, as a site that's been around longer than Y! AND G, and still banned by Y! but LOVED by G, I can relate that it's tough being the innovator and then watching everyone copy and succeed with your ideas and even claim them as their own. I still don't buy the line that "immitation is the greatest compliment"... I'll take money over compliments any day. :)
Amen to that! :) I totally agree with your thoughts on this one.
As for the bad publicity, I think that there are many hard working individuals at Yahoo who really do want to do a good job. After all, I don't think that anyone wants to go to work in the morning with the intention of squashing smaller companies or doing a 'bad' job. I think that some of the internal red tape factors might make it harder for them to do their jobs and at times look like they 'want' bad publicity, but I really do think that there have are some good people there who want to be seen as working for a good company. In fact, even though I haven't gotten our penalty removed, I've been corresponding with one individual who has been extremely polite and I think genuinely cares but has his hands tied in the process.
I personally hope that Yahoo cleans up some of the items that make them an easy target for bad publicity. I think that giving reasons for penalities and having an expedited review process (even for an additional fee) would be a good start. It certainly would end a few of these 'what do I do now' discussions.
BP
Like others around here I started with my first stumbling web page attempts from my own UNIX server when way back when I had a "real job" in 1992.
My pages got picked up by search engines that existed before Yahoo! something called Archie and then Webcrawler as I recall. Anyway my point is that I am have always been on the right side of things and have never had a ban of any sort in all those years - until now that is.
Now, things have changed at Yahoo! they are on a personal crusade to manualy clean up the web.
This crusade is doomed IMO. Why, because they tried it before with their directory index and found out that trying to index the web maunually was in the end impossible.
Do you remember they used to winge on about how long the submission process took because of all the submisisons and that they were only a finite number human editors.. So what are they trying to do now?
The same thing...pleeease yahoo!
Google has never looked better or more in control than they do now.
Design a new site?..yes go ahead two or three if you want. More sites, special Yahoo! sites yes go on.. lets swamp the web with yet more sites that should help the online world become more organised.. right!.
Yahoo! is trying to become more Google-like a but still just can't resist getting in there and tinkering by hand.
Just like they always did..
In any event, it is great to know I am in the good company of this crowd. At first I wondered if I might be one of few. My site has been online since '96 and gives away content for free. We earn 100% of revenue from affiliate programs and a few pennies with AdSense. But the total amount of money is not enough to draw anyone's attention. Yet we are now banned by Yahoo.
Could I ask the following question
From many serps I have looked at it appears Y now allows doorway pages with stuffed keywords and even rewards with a top 3 ranking
Most of these pages are 1k or less in size so not difficult for an algo to find and penalise
so is this allowed with sitematch only listings or should webmasters all go back to what worked some 4 years ago
I personally hope Yahoo continues to grow to provide competition to G and MSN but surely it is not in the users interest to be sent to a page with a click here and nothing else and even users do become disgruntled eventually
I do not think spam reports should be needed as it appears to be an inherrent weakness or favouring for sitematch customers
steve
