Yahoo slurps us but does not index us by keyword

Only our directory listing shows

[tkeating]

We have been on Yahoo for many years and have ranked highly for many keywords, but we recently noticed that we stopped showing up in the SERPs (I think I'm using the term correctly). We are a legitimate news organization, not a spam house, so I’m unsure what is happening.

When troubleshooting, I noticed that when I search on our main domain it only returns the Directory listing (1 result) and none of the SERPs. (spidered content).

Yahoo, MSN, and other Overture-partnered sites ALL only returns 1 result from our web domain and hundreds of external links.

Further, if you look at an Yahoo/Overture partner, such as Altavista, only 1 result is returned, i.e.

We ranked #1 - #5 for many keywords but now we have disappeared. Our site’s content is completely removed from Yahoo, other than our home page which was a Directory submission (and not a slurped/crawled/spidered site.)

How do we get our content back on Yahoo and all the other Overture-related sites? Are we blocked for some reason?

We are willing to pay money to get back into the search results, but I am unsure who to pay. Do I need to pay the $299 listing fee to Yahoo even though we're in there already? Or do I pay Overture and they push the search results to all their partners?

The really strange thing is that in the logfiles I do see Yahoo spidering more than just the robots.txt file. In fact, if I use the Yahoo News search engine, I do see more results for our domain name when searching for keywords.

For example if I search on our publisher's "unique" last name on "news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=<lastname>blah blah blah", I get lots of results:

So that brings up a whole different issue of whether or not the Yahoo news search engine uses a different set of rules than the main yahoo search engine.

Please help!

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 11:01 pm (utc) on Aug. 26, 2004]

[dfud]

I have almost the exact same situation for two domains I manage.

These sites, until about March of this year, held top positions on Yahoo, and still hold top positions on other search engines. I believe both sites have been penalized to the point of being essentially banned from Yahoo. Both companies are leaders in their industries and the sites are designed to be relatively search engine friendly. Neither site has ever attempted to manipulate any search engine. I’ve never participated in any “link swapping” but both sites have between 500 and 2000 quality linkbacks. Both sites are very popular. One receives about 600 visitors per day and the other about 15,000 per day.

About two months ago I sent an email describing the problem with one of the domains to [e-mail]. I was incredibly impressed when I received a reply the next day. The reply told me that there wasn't really any penalty but the problem was caused by the fact that I had many domains for each site, and, Yahoo incorrectly guessed which domain was the main domain.

The person that responded to my email told me that he would put a manual overide in, to fix the problem. I was blown away. A few hours later the problem was solved and my sites started coming up exactly as I would expect.

Unfortunately, an hour or two later our server went down for a few hours due to a major problem at our ISP. Then, the SERPs reverted to the way they were before.

Since then, I've disabled all of the secondary domains. But as of today each of these two sites still has one extra domain still in the SERPS.

The problem seems to be that the main domain has all of the linkbacks, but Yahoo "guesses" that a secondary domain is the "real" domain, so it ignores the linkbacks to the main domain.

I sent replies to the address of the person that originally helped me. But I never received another response.

[tkeating]

We do have a couple of other DNS entries that point to subfolders within our main domain. So maybe Yahoo is getting confused?

For example, (and using generic URL terms), we have:

www.widget-callcenter.com pointing to www.maindomain.com/magazine/callcenter

www.widget-voip.com pointing to www.maindomain.com/magazine/voip

I know Yahoo punishes you for exorbitant numbers of DNS entries pointing to same domain, but we only have like 3-4.

We use these shorter domain names to redirect to subfolders to same users the hassle of typing a long URL, not to play any sort of SEO games. Hopefully Yahoo_Mike can help me out.

I'll try the email address you suggested and will post here if he does indeed help me out.

[dfud]

What I don't understand is why Yahoo leaves my abandoned domains up as broken links, for more than a month. I've written to every email address I can find at Yahoo, and so far no one will pull them down.

Broken links certainly make them look bad. It baffles me that they won't pull them down.