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I feel like success can really hurt. About three years ago a spent 6 six months compiling research and built possibly the most informative web site for a specific commercial industry. Over the year the site has even grown further. Things were going really well. Many sites linked to it based on it useful content. Google and Yahoo ranked it #1 for a major keyphrase. Then things went to heck. Several of the sites that linked to my site used cgi script links. When Yahoo indexed these links it didn't understand and thought it was duplicate content. Suddenly only the link would show up in the serps, not the actual site.
I wrote to the company who used the link and got it removed. 2-3 months later it finally got dropped from Yahoo, however, I expected my site to return but this was not the case. My site also got removed. Now it seems that my site is banned from Yahoo all because someone linked to it using a cgi redirecting link.
I tried writing Yahoo, but had no luck.
I need help and wonder if anyone can help me.
That kind of link may or may not help you but how would that be duplicate content, which basically is copying an entire page?
You have no control over how someone links to you and Google, certainly, has spent much effort making sure that nobody can destroy your site as you claim. If they could, competitors would have a trivial way to get rid of their rivals. Almost surely the same is true of Yahoo.
Getting back into Yahoo and re-establishing a site are both excruciating processes, but at least you have some control over the 2nd option.
The fact is this types of link can have this type of effect. I have actually noticed several competitors sabotaging sites by linking to them. It is similar to the old trick of copying a competitor's site and getting them dropped for duplicate content then changing your site back so noone notices what you've done. It was/is a popular trick with Google, I've had several clients affected.
Before I get side tracked too much. The reason I started this thread was to get the problem resolved. I feel like I'm almost there. The link is gone. Now I just have to get my site back in the index.
Any suggestions on how to get Yahoo to lift the penalty?
This is another case of duplicate content problem with Yahoo. Where Yahoo mistakenly thinks the www and non-www versions are two different sites and penalizes the ranking.
So how do we fix these problems.
1) cgi script links
2) www and non-www
How do I speak to Yahoo? I am offering free consultant services to Yahoo. If Yahoo is listening this is great opportunity usually I charge $100-200 per hour.
It's that silly "www." subdomain.
The fact is, that convention has been dead for years. It's four characters that nobody should have to type; it is an unnecessary and pointless appendix to the URL.
And you're fighting a losing battle to try to keep it, because you're running afoul of one of the current affiliate scams. See, the homepage of your favorite affiliate site creates a subdomain for every affiliate: john_doe.myspam.com, richard_roe.nyspam.com, etc. The search engines are going to have to strip off that subdomain and favor the bare domain name ... they have no choice.
And neither do you. Get with the program, drop the www and start fixing your URLs. And start living down the results of a past fixation on the ancient location of your cheese bin.
