How do you determine if you have been penalized?

Penalized by Yahoo?

[meingalls]

I am wondering how to find out if a website for which we are consultants has been penalized by Yahoo. We are new to the SEO world, and sent an email to Yahoo to see if there is problem but have gotten no response. Can anyone give us an indication if there some way to determine if this is going on? The site is removed.

Thanks in advance,

Mark

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 1:41 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2004]

[kwngian]

I think there are currenty two types of penalty. One is, your site is completely gone from Yahoo. Another one is only afew pages are in the index.

It is surprisingly quiet here for some strange reasons where penalty is discussed.

There are many sites that are affected by these penalties. We have a big directory site in our area that has been penalised too.

Sorry:- you can check via site:www.yourdomain.com.

[meingalls]

Thanks, we don't even know if we have been penalized. We have never shown up in their directory. It could be that is just too soon to be showing up in the search engine or their directory. Can anyone give us a clue as to how to determine if we have been penalized? Should we assume if after 3 months and some valid links that we have been penalized for some reason? Any rough guidelines or indications to follow?

Thanks,

M

[twebdonny]

Is your site being spidered by Slurp or one of it's variations?

>>>It is surprisingly quiet here for some strange reasons where penalty is discussed.<<<<<<<<

ain't that a fact....MIKE....

[kwngian]

Yes, that's true. If you have been spidered by Slurp regularly, you should be in the index at least within the time frame you stated unless you are penalised.

If you get visits from the dreaded 209.131.* range of Slurp, it is almost certain that you have incurred a penalty.

[diamondgrl]

kwngian,

why do you say that ip range for slurp is the dreaded range? where did that come from?

[kwngian]

There was a discussion here earlier on about penalised sites being visited by that Slurp using that range of ips.

I did a check on my logs for it. All of my sites that were currently penalised were visited by that bot at least once every month.

At that time when everyone was complaining about being dropped from Yahoo, I was experiencing a significant increase from Yahoo (about 10% more traffic). Then I got a visit from Slurp spider using 209.131.* range and my site was dropped the very next day.

I lost about 95% of my pages in their index for that particular site.

[Dave_T]

kwngian,

I checked the 209.131 ip on 2 sites that is still doing fairly good in Y! and it's there. Visited once last month. Also can be found once last month in one of my site that is just removed entirely from Y's index. But on the other site, which is doing fairly well in Y!, I couldn't find that IP.

So, I'm not sure about your theory.

Dave

[kwngian]

Yup. Silly me. I just don't have enough data to justify that statement.

Wish there were more feedback from the penalised webmasters here.

[ThePhoenix]

Being Penalized by the SE's really sucks. If we were sending email SPAM, there are pleanty of resources to determine if we are being blacklisted.

I too have lost over 80% of my traffic. I have no idea why, but none of my pages are indexed in Yahoo.

I did not see a gradual decrease. Literally overnight, my traffic stopped. Aug 10th-11th.

Does anyone have an idea if they penalize the IP that the domain is using, or the domain?

I find it hard to believe that they penalize the domain forever. What if I were to sell the domain 2-3 years from now. Would that new owner be penalized as well? You can imagine the HUGE number of sites that would never get back in the SERPS becasue of previous owners. Especially YEARS down the road.

It sucks that the SE's are the GODS. Just wish there was a way to determine what we did wrong, why, how, etc.

-The Phoenix

[bbonline]

I agree with you phoenix.

It seems Yahoo penalizes IP addresses. I had many webs with the same IP and got penalized over the line. Now there are three months and I have split up into separate IP, changed servers, cleaned up all possible errors according to Y! guidelines, boy I have done everything possible, but not a single page have re-entered the index.

I have also created a new web, very typical keyword based, listed with Y! directory and within few days it was entirely into Y! serps. This new web is on a new IP address of course.

There you have it. Forget about re-entering Y! index in the near future, create new webs or mirror of your old one, similar to what Google used to like 2 years back, put some old fashioned SEO into it and you will skyrocket again in Yahoo!

Yahoo is so easy to manipulate these days and they can not penalize all websites in their index.

I am still waiting for webmasters to act on Yahoo as they once did with "mother of all Engines" Google. Yahoo will never be close to Google in all aspects, serps, customer relations, support, information to webmasters etc.,

Yahoo knows how to chicken out and they have done so with a lot of webmasters.

P.s. Forgot to mention. SiteMatch is a waste of time and money. You will never get anything from it. Use the money to create new webs instead.

[ThePhoenix]

Hey BBonline-

All of my domains are on seperate IP's.

As I always do, I am refreshing the content on all of the pages.

My plan is to move a few domains to a entirely new server, with new IP's etc.

I am wondering if this will help clear this penalty.

What are your thoughts?

-The Phoenix

[DaveAtIFG]

meingalls, assuming your site has existed for a year or more, if a search for your domain name doesn't return any pages, I think a penalty is a safe assumption.

If you had no traffic from Ink partner sites before YST was deployed, that may indicate you inherited an Ink penalty.

Let's keep it "on topic" folks. Thanks! :)

[johnlim]

I have a yahoo banned site. And after it was removed from yahoo two months later I made some modifications to the site and removed some links to another yahoo-banned site two weeks ago.

I found yahoo! slurp started to crawl that site the next day I made the modification. There are more than 200 hits since then. But my site still cannot find in yahoo.

Does anybody have an idea on when yahoo! will recache the modified banned site(assume the site is a clean site to yahoo)?

[Imaster]

<sarcasm>If your site is competing with any of the other yahoo channels, that is a clear sign that you are/will be penalized</sarcasm>

[soapystar]

lets get this straight.....recently there was a change in the treatment of banned sites..what is a banned site?..a site that until this month only had hits on its robots.txt....that when a search was made on the domain name i.e. mydomain if your site is mydomain.com (so you are searching without the extension) didnt show your site. This month most of those sites found they were being hit internally..at the same time sporadic spidering resumed and in parallel a search for mydomain.com (with the extension included) no longer brought up your site...before even for a banned domain this would bring up their site.....

so recent spidering does not mean you are about to be unbanned....perhaps it means they realised without spidering there was no way to know if you had fixed your problems..perhaps it means they need to look like they care....either way trying to find logic in the ban process is a bit like applying science without the chaos theory...pointless...chaos says that things happen in a random manner..if you didnt know that you could spend your life trying to find a golden rule when in actual fact there isnt one...

[hazardtomyself]

The site:www.yousite.com appears to be a good determining factor. (Having a large spiderable site with alot of inbound links but only a few pages showing up)

I have a site that is penalized but should not be IMHO. I have considered taking the necessary steps to unpenalize it, email Yahoo!, make changes, etc. but I have significant proof for my business that being found in Yahoo! isn't that big of deal compared to being found in Google.