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I have four travel sites, well established and leaders in my chosen travel area. All figure very well on Google and until the changeover on yahoo! too.
When Y! changed to their own search engine three of my sites went missing and one stayed. The one that stayed had no interlinking and was on a free server, it ranks reasonably well. The site was one of the first I ever set up and I had notreally optimised well.
The other three related and interlinked sites were all gone. The sites were not spammy and had original content on all three but interlinking was probably the cause.
Of course I sent mails to Yahoo! and read extensively the boards for clues etc to try to understand the penalty criteria and more importantly if these penalties are automated or by hand. No reply ever from Yahoo!.
Anyway, after about two months one of the sites suddenly popped up in the number one position on yahoo! for all of its keywords.
I still do not know why, but what is really puzzling me is that of the three optimised and interlinked sites that were penalized originally why should one suddenly pop back in there at number 1! They all used more or less the same design and have existed for five years or more. They are also all listed in the Yahoo! directory.
I have not seen or read anything to convince me that Yahoo! uses exclusivley automated or hand editing so I guess it must be both which makes things complicated.
One of the sites still banned has some really good original content not related to the other two and I feel I have waited long enough to ensure that it will not be reincluded in Yahoo! so I have decided to make a clean start with a new domain.
I am thinking of just registering the .net version. Perhaps that is too naive and should I change to something completley different?
Anyway for what its worth these are the only sure facts I have to offer anyone stuggling to figure out the new Yahoo! search.
Anyone else trying to understand Yahoo!...?
it is a dark, mysterious situation, somewhat unfair of yahoo to keep sites and businesses in this situation and while i understand their argument that they can not tell you what is wrong and what needs to be fixed they GOT TO DO SOMETHING to help us understand, fix, improve.
Mike, Tim telling us read the guidelines does not work for many like me who still can not figure out what is wrong after reading and studying the guidelines for hundreds of times.
they can not tell you what is wrong and what needs to be fixed
please please lets put this myth to bed. Yahoo do tell you! Sometimes it will be through a pay for inclusion partner, or by chance finding someone whose perhaps having a good day, or you have contacts of your own inside yahoo, or you were one of the guys on this forum thay got lucky with the yahoo pr guys in the early days of the switch, or you were in the right plaqce at the right etc etc....nuff said...
the point is plenty of people one way or another have found out the exct reason for a ban...they acted on that info and got their sites back in...yahoo did not collapse overnight and nobody wrote a book about their inside knowledge of how to spam Yahoo. The idea that if they told the particular eason for your site being banned that everyone could spam there holds no water at all. Its not secret how to spam them, just look at the index.
There are many reasons why they would want this myth to be the accepted as the norm and being able to spam them isnt one of them. IMHO.
"The other three related and interlinked sites were all gone."
We experienced the removal of quite a few sites and it is our belief the interlinking was the trouble. It would appear Yahoo is very sensitive to interlinking. Particularly, if the links listed on site A, all link to one another as well.
one more thing for those who are going through the process of reaplying: even if Y or site match guys point you to a reason for penalty do not get excited; their answers can be contradictory. some of the replies i have received sugguested there is no problem with the site at all, others suggested it is a directory style and that is why having trouble while, others suggested to a specific issue which was fixed for months now and reported back to Y to be fixed yet no change dispite the fact that Y crawl every day.
Randle, I would have agreed about the interlinking except that the site that miraculously popped back in at Number one had exactly the same interlinking scheme as the other two left out in the cold.
Logical conclusion would have to be a human intervention of some kind as automated control would have shot all three.
I imagine that Yahoo! will lose the battle with manual intevention in the end, just as they did with their directory maintainance before, and so probably will come to rely more and more on automated procedures.
Not surprising then that they are so secretive because I imagine that their automated procedures/scripts (or whatever) which they will sooner or later have to rely on cannot yet be as mature as Google's.
Enotalone, Giving up sounds nice, but for the moment not really an option given the reach of Yahoo. I am going ahead from scratch with site just for Yahoo! anyway.
In the end the only winners all this will be the Web hosting companies as there must be thousands of new web sites being prepared and submitted just to get around the Newhoo! hassle.
Yahoo hates competition, and does whatever necessary
to stifle it.
We are also trying to understand Yahoo!...? One of our travel sites was dropped from Yahoo when they stopped using the Google index and switched to their own technology. It appeared that the problem may have been with redirects - this was corrected but the site remains out of Yahoo.
twebdonny ...you wrote..
Quote "Keyword>>travel
Yahoo hates competition, and does whatever necessary
to stifle it."
Is this speculation or do you have any evidence of how Yahoo stifles competiton, especially regards travel sites?
Does anyone else have evidence of Yahoo using human intervention - manual bans - and later being reincluded?
soapystar...you wrote:that many have "found out the exct reason for a ban...they acted on that info and got their sites back in"
Again, where are the examples and evidence? Without proof your statment seems to be just one more myth clouding the situation even more...
We are also trying to understand Yahoo!...? One of our travel sites was dropped from Yahoo when they stopped using the Google index and switched to their own technology. It appeared that the problem may have been with redirects - this was corrected but the site remains out of Yahoo.
twebdonny ...you wrote..
Quote "Keyword>>travel
Yahoo hates competition, and does whatever necessary
to stifle it."
Is this speculation or do you have any evidence of how Yahoo stifles competiton, especially regards travel sites?
Does anyone else have evidence of Yahoo using human intervention - manual bans - and later being reincluded?
soapystar...you wrote:that many have "found out the exct reason for a ban...they acted on that info and got their sites back in"
Again, where are the examples and evidence? Without proof your statment seems to be just one more myth clouding the situation even more...
Again, where are the examples and evidence? Without proof your statment seems to be just one more myth clouding the situation even more...
oh, ok.
Our travel site has been steadily falling off of Yahoo serps, we can be found in some obscure serps such as "travel to santiago" but any competitive serps such as "travel to London" we are not found at all.
This started about 3 months ago, Yahoo says we do not meet their guidelines but would not be explicit. We have contested this issue with them and have yet to hear back.
BTW, we are in Google in the top 7 searches for all of our major keywords
People in this forum have suggested that Yahoo is trying to suppress competition for their travel biz and I would have to agree....
Our sites are also travel sites and one country specific site has been dropped completly from Yahoo! since around the time they switched from their agreement with Google to using their own search technology...
The last remaining site has just been zapped by Yahoo!
This was a Geocities site. It was in the Y! directory and has existed for around ten years. It had NO interlinking or doggy stuff whatsoever. It was built when most people in this forum had not even heard of the internet and Yahoo! believed in an open internet.
Another turn of the screw for Yahoo! and the last turn for me..
Adios Yahoo! I will not be wasting any more time on you.
I now have to agree with so many others on these boards that Yahoo! is definately targeting all and any competition to further its own ends..!
May Yahoo!s demise come soon.
The sites were not spammy and had original content on all three but interlinking was probably the cause.
You had/have four travel sites? Can you give us a basic outline of what their purpose and content was? (e.g. if they were just affiliate spam directories this will be pretty easy to pin-point!)
yes sir...lets say you are a big web...tycoon. and a small fish go there at your kingdom at #1 for widgets.... you call your inside editor whisper the URL and manually the www.smallfish.com out of the game...
Oh, please! I'll be the first to back a good quality conspiracy theory but saying that Yahoo will actually remove a "small-fish" at the "big-fish's" request? What you mean is:
"A site bigger than me, better optimized than me, more quality pages than me, longer-established than me and more inbound on-topic links than me beat me in the results - therefore Yahoo must have done it manually!"
Bigger companies don't get to the top of the results by bribing Yahoo employees, they don't need to.
the point is plenty of people one way or another have found out the exct reason for a ban...they acted on that info and got their sites back in...
Just to back up soapy's statement againts those who AREN'T getting replies from Yahoo. Have you ever thought that maybe your site was in such bad shape that they didn't have the time to explain it all to you? I've had responses for several of my sites but each of them had either crawler issues or scripting issues that were playing havoc with Yahoobot.
If I needed a complete overhaul of my site then I wouldn't expect a response from Yahoo - that's like asking the plumber to write you out a manual on how to fix the pipe so you don't have to pay him ....
We have had a response from Yahoo - the 3rd site in my profile was dropped from Yahoo.
Our webmaster wrote that "Yahoo reduces ambiguity by removing trailing slashes altogether". As the in-house ISAPI mod_rewrite / IISrewrite webserver component setup served up both a slashed and non-slashed version of every page he concludes that this is the reason one site was dropped by Yahoo... does anyone else have any examples of problems caused by slahed/ non-slashed URL's?
I can type any of the following into my browser:
* [mysite.net...]
* [mysite.net...]
* [mysite.net...]
* [mysite.net...]
* www.mysite.net/
* www.mysite.net
* mysite.net/
* mysite.net
Each and every one of those will wind up at my main ~/index.html page, the one and only exact same page.
1) Just what is the difference?
2) Is there a way to send these to different pages?
3) If so, is there risk of duplicate content?
I religiously stay in straight HTML.
Thanks - Larry
On most webserver configurations, you'll get the same page for all of these, though it is indeed possible to deliver different content to www.mysite.net and mysite.net . As for the http:// in front of these, when you type a web address in your browser window, if it looks like a web address, your browser will just assume it's http:// (which means a page fetched via hypertext transfer protocol, as opposed to, say, ftp).
As for the trailing slash on www.mysite.net/ , that trailing slash means: 'what's in the root directory'. I don't think most people make a big deal of the trailing slash for the main page, maybe they should; I make a big deal of it in subdirectories, like www.mysite.net/directory/
The first reason is that SE's don't have unlimited processing power, and they sometimes don't deal well with these different addresses which, in a standard server configuration, will deliver the same page. So if you can make sure that SE's only index www.mysite.net and not mysite.net/index.html, and all the other other slash/noslash/www/no www variants, it won't find any duplicate pages, so you won't get punished for any duplicate pages. If people link both to mysite.net and www.mysite.net, and you use a 301 permanent redirect for mysite.net, all this PR should also then be pointed to your one www.mysite.net page. This is 'consolidating' PR and is generally recommended. So, I make all pages like mysite.net/directory redirect to www.mysite.net/directory/ .
Second reason - choosing the trailing slash instead of without it - is that in a standard server setup, where there's no trailing slash, the server first checks to see if there's a file without an extension, and then not finding it, only then goes to see if there's a directory with that name. If there's a trailing slash, it goes directly to looking for the directory, you save time / server work. You can find an excellent article on this matter if you google for 'slashforward' .
So if it's true that yahoo refuses to index url's with the slash forward, and tries making requests stripping this slash, it could get mixed up for two reasons -
- files without extensions, getting confused with directories of the same name (very rare - most people give files on webservers extensions to avoid this mixup)
- webservers which only deliver content from directories with trailing slash, which is more or less 'what they're supposed to do', as delivering the content without that slash is actually an error compensation, won't get indexed. Many sites with diligent webmasters who try to 'educate' the spiders by showing them only the real, 'by the book' url's would get punished, since yahoo's behavior is relying on an error compensation servers have which is what confused these spiders in the first place.
I have a website on classic rock bands with all original biographies, out of print interviews, and discographies in chronological order. I sell CDs etc from links on the discography lists. The site took years to write, and is my main source of income.
Two and a half months ago, Yahoo completely erased every page from their index. I have written numerous letters to them. One employee has taken the time to answer me, but all he would say was "Our team has reviewed your site and decided that the current treatment in the Yahoo! index is appropriate." So, I totally disagree with the person who said you can get a specific explanation from Yahoo.
However, I do agree that this is a blatant attempt to delete competition. Yahoo recently began publishing their own music site, called "Launch". Launch has completely unoriginal biographies but also sells CDs using links from the bands discographies.
It would take forever to establish a new domain just for Yahoo. Instead, I'm totally boycotting them. I was an sbcyahoo isp customer and used numerous yahoo services, but no more. I just wish altavista, fast, lycos etc would disassociate from yahoo so that it wouldn’t be so devastating.
Well, I just wanted to vent and add my two cents.
Hope others have better luck or fairer treatment than I got!
Thank you very much for your kind and very detailed
reply to my question! I see that the http:// trailer is a non-issue.
I decided long ago to go with www.mysite.net (WITH the www. )
The question is, should I do anything about the small minority who might link in as simply 'mysite.net'?
I don't know much of anything about redirects, and I'm a little afraid to mess with anything like that before I know what I'm doing.
Second question, the trailing slash:
All my internal links back to index.html are given as www.mysite.net/ i.e. WITH the trailing slash. I have a lot external links out there that I can't change. Some of them give the / and others leave it off.
Is this anything I should be concerned with? I prefer the slash for the sake of speed if nothing else.
Thanks again - Larry
So, I totally disagree with the person who said you can get a specific explanation from Yahoo.
you misunderstood my post. Yahoo want it generally believed that they will not tell you the exact reason for a ban because it would help you spam them. There are several reasons why i believe the want it generally believed this is the case and spamming isnt one of them. The point i made was that SOME webmsters have been fortunate enough to have either contacts inside Yahoo, or recieved a rare exact reply from the standard address, or with extra help from pfi partners or indeed from yahoo pr guys on this very forum in the early days of the switch( or other means not mentioned). The point is they do knowingly tell SOME webmasters the exact reasons for a ban. It is a very small percentage that were fortunate enough to benfit but benefit they did. They were able to address the exact issues and rectify them, and get their sites back in. Why yahoo wouldnt want this on a large scale is for you to ponder. The opportunity to monetarise this process is huge and yet even though totally profit driven they do not want to go down that route. To me that is hugely significant.
That said, it's probably best not do do this for the root directory, mysite.com. Though most sites make links to '/index.html' for the root directory, to be consistent throughout your site's linking strategy, you can also just link to '/' if you're preferring the slash, or to 'ht*p://mysite.com', and that will prevent mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html from being duplicate pages.
If you really aren't up for all this redirect stuff, which I understand completely, just try to make your own links within your site consistent. This will already be doing a lot more than most people do. Later, you can either get somebody to do this for you, or try it yourself with maybe a little help from some people around here.
UPDATE, ADDED: Ok, did a little research to try to come a bit more to grips with this problem. It seems that Apache, in its normal configuration, will *always* give a 301 - 'moved permanently' redirect whenever a directory is called without a trailing slash, with no page content (in Apache's case, it's a small error page that's sent with the 301). IIS is similar. So I can't imagine the yahoo bot then not being able to go from a non-slashed url with a 301 to the slashed equivalent - hope this helps. You can check this yourself with the HTTP View option at the seotoolkit site - just found this - nicer than the HTTP headers options on many webdev toolbars since it also shows you the page content that's being given.
This also has some consequences in terms of SEO theory and practices. Since basically all webservers are giving 301's to non-slashed url's, it means that spiders' behavior regarding to the 'saving' of links must also be affected by the links found on the page, whether or not the server issues a 301 - i.e., the old school '301 should solve it' does not always apply. Even though your server, then, always gives 301's for non-slashed url's, you should still abide by a fairly strict linking policy if you want only one set of url's to get into the SERPS. That said, it does seem that Google always slashes directories, so it probably follows these 301's ok - previously, the 'biggest' problem with multiple url's for the same page was alltheweb, but it wouldn't suprise me if yahoo also isn't up to par with google in consolidating url's which normally should be equivalent.
[edited by: 2_much at 6:58 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2004]
[edit reason] removed URL [/edit]
Do you know exactly when Yahoo began using Inktomi?
I never paid to be in Overture so had virtually no presense in that whole system. However, when Yahoo first split from Google, they ranked my site in the top 5 for almost every band I featured. Then, in August, total deletion.
I'm just trying to make sense out of this. So, did they take over Inktomi this past August, or when they first stopped using Google's search results?
Thanks,
Karen
Mar 19, 2003: Yahoo! announced the completion of their acquistion of Inktomi
Yahoo! Grabs Overture (and AlltheWeb and AltaVista)
Jul 14, 2003
(Reported by Search Engine Showdown:by Greg R. Notess)
