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This is despite it being a popular site that does well in all other search engines.
Initally I put the problem down to having too much identical javascript at the top of each page - perhaps making each page look the same to Yahoo - but this has since been put into an external file.
We did have a couple of "copy cat" websites - but they've now been taken down by their ISPs.
But so far, Yahoo is still only indexing the first page (and only when you type in the url).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to encourage Yahoo to reindex the website?
I wish I had an answer. I've heard rare tales about sites being reincluded. Otherwise, once your site gets branded, I think you can pretty much forget it with Yahoo. Google, of course, is much more receptive.
With Google anytime that we've had a problem we've received help by online form, posts and by calling direct. With Yahoo we've received no help whatsoever.
Fortunately as we're in the UK its not quite as major a concern as it would be if we were stateside. Across our other brands we do very rank highly in Yahoo - but it accounts for only 10%-12.5% of traffic to these sites (much lower than Google).
But its still far from ideal having clients searching for us but not finding us, and being down (potentially) 12% of the traffic.
If anyone has any further suggestions on getting any kind of useful info from Yahoo, then please let me know!
[edited by: TravelSite at 9:57 am (utc) on Feb. 14, 2007]
Not one thing they mention in their canned response applies. I don't think they even bother to look at a site submitted for reinclusion. I'm not wasting any more time on it. Inktomi still crawls, however, but why bother? Right now its not taking up too much bandwidth.
I cannot ditch my domain, but I tried with the .net for while, and now I moved everything to an old domain, from which all other engines are excluded.
I have had sites re added to Yahoo. Generally I had to remove any form of directory I had and look at page interlinking.
Generally sites tend to be removed the 'most' from what I have seen and experienced due to linking, whether it be interlinking sites on the same network, extensive and overlinking between pages, and even linking out to other directories from a directory-style site.
I know of 3 sites that were removed because they offered to list websites higher if the website linked back to them.
[edited by: CainIV at 8:03 am (utc) on Feb. 19, 2007]
Generally sites tend to be removed the 'most' from what I have seen and experienced due to linking, whether it be interlinking sites on the same network, extensive and overlinking between pages, and even linking out to other directories from a directory-style site.
Yep, this is the most common reason for a Yahoo ban. Many folks are confused when they are unaffected in Google and MSN but get banned by Y!, assuming that all SEs look at linking the same way.
Besides what CainIV mentioned above a main factor is a preponderence of reciprocal links. If that's all you've got, a site is probably out of Y!
The first thing to do for Y is to look at anything to do with links with a very cold hard eye.
i have a website related to bike store has the good indiexing in google and msn. But yahoo has indxed my other pages leaving home page and now all the pages are removed from the yahoo search engine.
Is my site is banned?
if so can you please advice me what to do with my site to reindex in yahoo search engine with my home page.
Thanks,
Best Regards
One of the sites has the most comprehensive collection of resources I've come across anywhere in its sector, far superior to the Yahoo directory's coverage of the sector. It's a directory I'd be proud of if it were mine.
Maybe Yahoo can't stand competition?
*Yes I know Y is near the top of Alexa, but if you look deeper, all their traffic is under Mail, not search! When Y was carrying G's results, we saw a solid 5 times the traffic from G.
About 3 days after I disappeared, I showed up again, but now I only have 3 pages indexed.
I hadn't made ANY changes to the site in about 3 weeks. I'm not doing anything illegal or tricky, its a pretty basic ecommerce site.
We actually launched the site because we noticed a large gap in actual informative sites in this niche compared to link directories with blatant SEO spamming that were nothing but link farms. Both Google and MSN have shown the site quite a bit of love.
We do have a directory as mentioned by some but directories are essential to how this niche does business. The site was banned before the directory was added any way. If Yahoo considers directories to be spam, they can shove it. It’s there for the site visitors and we’re doing it in a different way that our visitors love.
Things I’ve seen mentioned that haven’t helped us…
.EDU links – We have links from five major universities because the information we provide is legit and useful.
Yahoo Directory – We’ve been in it since last Summer. Evidently we’re good enough for the $299/year directory but not the regular index.
DMOZ – We’ve been listed since right before the crash.
Site Feed – We’ve submitted a site feed for over six-months now.
Reciprocal Linking – We never do reciprocal linking.
After the last e-mail with a list of non-relevant quality guidelines I just wrote Yahoo off. It's not like I used their search engine any way.
Just to stress it, there are tons of ibl's with a good showing of .edu and .gov's among them. No recips.
I agree entirely with writing Y off.
[edited by: Go60Guy at 1:56 am (utc) on Mar. 5, 2007]
I'm not going to pay 10 cents/click to have my site show up in the natural results. Something is screwed up at Yahoo in this area. If they are going to throw sites out of the results, they need to put in efforts to make sure they are not throwing out the wrong sites. Right now their efforts are for show and nothing else.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to encourage Yahoo to reindex the website?
If your penalized, your only hope is to get that penalty lifted. You can spot a penalized site in Yahoo, if you search site:www.domain.com and all you get is the index, or just the index and all other pages are just title and URL only. You can be penalized and still get pages other than your index to show, but the key thing is they won’t have the word “cached” next to them. Eventually, with all penalized sites, you will only have the index page left; its just a matter of time. It is not rare or unusual to incur a penalty with Yahoo. Lots of people have penalized sites and they think there just not ranking well.
If you do have a penalty you can’t make it any worse, so you want to go through the motions. First thing to do is confirm the penalty with Yahoo. To do that go here;
[add.yahoo.com...]
Skip over the ridiculous instructions at the top about entering in a unique sentence in quotation marks and see if the index page of your site appears. The fact is all index pages remain in the index even when penalized, so this exercise is pointless (other than interior pages that have been removed, but its easier to identify the penalty by just focusing on the index page). Scroll down a bit and fill out the form, if you think you know the problem, clean it up and tell them so.
You will get a response from Yahoo with a vague statement like, “your site may not meet the Yahoo guidelines”, get anything other than a direct statement saying you are not penalized, and you are penalized. The most they offer in terms of an explanation is to go look at their guidelines at; [help.yahoo.com...]
If you get confirmation you are penalized, try and fix the problem, don’t assume anything. The majority of sites that are penalized are due to some sort of linking scenario, or they are connected due to a common server.
After you have addressed what you think the problem might be, (and again you have to get off the “there’s nothing wrong with my site thinking) There probably isn’t in terms of Google, but the issue is Yahoo, and some sort of filter was tripped, or a hand penalty applied, so something caused the penalty to be applied, fair or not. You’re out until you change it.
Once you get to the bottom of it go here; [add.yahoo.com...]
This is for requesting a second review on your site. You want to be careful with this, the guidelines say you get two looks and that’s it. They will give you more but DO NOT submit your site unless you are very, very confident you have fixed the problem, because most likely you have not.
Yeah, Yahoo is woeful at providing any kind of useful information to webmasters in these situations.
Yahoo will never, ever communicate with you on this. Doesn’t matter if you never spend a dime with them, or you spend $100K/year; they literally couldn’t care less who you are, or what your relationship is with them, or the quality of your site for that matter.
FWIW, my site has been in the directory for years. That has no bearing at all, from what I can tell.
Is Yahoo still reading this board? If so, please consider this an appeal to re-examine your policy regarding judgments against a site to allow for redemption.
People have been begging for a Yahoo representative to grace us here with their presence and just have some sort of basic dialogue about this issue but so far they just don’t seem inclined.
I have the same problem with one of my sites. I've submitted re-inclusion requests after doing a complete cleanup. All I get is a standardized reply outlining all the possible reasons for rejection, none of which apply.
I wish I had an answer. I've heard rare tales about sites being reincluded. Otherwise, once your site gets branded, I think you can pretty much forget it with Yahoo. Google, of course, is much more receptive.
I hope the following helps some of you:
I read all the above posts and I myself have been going through the same for the past year. I done everything and did a re-inclusion request and at the end the reply is always the same: a reply with their guidelines in the email requesting that we take a look at it. We did this so many times and we knew we were meeting their guidelines but I felt that they were not taking the time to look at the site though.
So last week they came out with the basic submission plan where you submit 5 URL’s. (BTW: all my pages were indexed but not ranking for any term what so ever.) I submitted two URLs just to test, and in two days I started to rank. Now from 1 year of getting no traffic from Yahoo as soon as I submitted two URLs for $50 dollars a piece I’m ranking. What’s the deal with Yahoo? I have a huge site so do they want me to spend 50 for each URL. It doesn’t make sense.
Anyways so now the only two pages that rank our ones that I submitted. What’s even weirder is that for all other terms on different pages they are ranking the homepage and not the actual page that is well optimized.
I hope this little piece of info helps others. I’m not saying that you should submit your URL’s but if you have nothing to lose maybe submitting one might not hurt. But be sure that your URL’s do meet the guidelines.
1. A site that does zero except generate leads. That might sound unfair, but from the search engine's perspective, there is no shortage of sites intended to send you elsewhere. It helps if your site has useful information, but don't lie to yourself: Sales copy is not content.
2. Site maps at the bottom of the page, or worse, on every page of your site. Thumbs down if you have the state by state site map, too. Very likely won't pass a hand check.
3. Multi-page reciprocal link pages. Won't pass a hand check. Expect a combat boot on your site's butt if the pages look straight out of the box, (link-1.html, link-17.html).
4. Hypens in your domain name. While hyphens are not bad and don't account for getting you booted, it-definitely-sends-the-wrong-message.com. If you have more than one hyphen, you may want to rethink your URL. Personally, I feel uncomfortable even with one hyphen.
5. Templates. That's not going to help your cause either. Sends the wrong signal. So here today gone tomorrowish, know what I mean? Why make your effort an uphill battle?
I spent 1/2 day yesterday going through their guidelines and one by one explaining how they don't apply to our site.
I have had reply back in less than 12 hours with the standard e-mail. With same guidelines that I went through the day before.
WASTE OF TIME.............