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Yahoo's Slurp spider is still indexing my site constantly, so much so that I put the crawl delay in robots.txt to slow it down (after the drop in visits, thinking it was bogging down my server).
The domain in question currently has 400,000+ pages indexed in Yahoo, so it's not a banning issue as far as I can tell. Once thing I did notice that when using Yahoo's site explorer when you click on the "Cached" link under each listing, the cached page is displayed. BUT when you click the "Current Page" link at the top of the cached listing in goes to my home page instead of the current version of the cached page. Could this be part of the problem, some kind of weird redirect issue? I could not duplicate the problem with other sites in Yahoo.
This traffic drop occurred sometime around 5pm Eastern Time on June 13th (Wednesday). It was almost like a switch was pressed. The sit gets several thousand visits per day, and now it's a couple hundred or so.
I even switched over to me backup server on a completely separate web host (thinking server issue), and traffic has not increased. This pretty much isolates the problem to Yahoo's end.
I'm at wit's end.... any ideas, anyone.
Well, this is for sure, unless they copy eachoter :-)
And: this algo change is the one that puts the two algos in the highest similarity degree since the birth of both engines.
With the "move" happened the 13th of June, Yahoo! is now resembling Google even more.
They now like some sites that are Google's old favourites in my industries, and have never ranked on Yahoo!
In this transition, they have simply "forgotten" some important sites (important for both Yahoo and Google, I mean, from an historical point of view).
Which, I see, are slowly coming back in the results (hammered to 60 or 100-something positions are now climbing back to some 10 to 30-something).
All of a sudden. So it was a very quick shift.
For us on the European side of the ocean, this happened actually the 14th. Surely, 14th accesses where good as always, 15th accesses immediately bad, and the 15th type of reduced traffic lasted at least up to yesterday.
We see some movements as I said, but it was a "sharp cut" from how I've seen it (consider we have several tens of thousands indexed urls on Y! therefore my stats are credible as they are based on thousands of daily clicks).
It was not a spotted spam filering on our sites only, as I saw a lot of competitors to get this lost and others are posting the same behaviour, I guess not exactly on my industry.
Still, I can't find the pattern associated to that.
It continues to get worse, to the point of pathetic where nearly all the anemic Yahoo visits come from searches that involve our URL, or other variations on the site name.
As a comparison over the last 30 days...
Google: 760,000+ visits -- 245,000+ keywords -- 4% from variations on site name
Ask: 16,000+ visits -- 12,000+ keywords -- 27% from variations on site name
AOL: 14,000+ visits -- 8,000+ keywords -- 18% from variation son site name
MSN: 9,000+ visits -- 1,400+ keywords -- 31% from variations on site name
Yahoo: 6,417 visits -- 817 keywords -- 94% from variations on site name
Would be nice to know what changed in Yahoo algo!
"Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.
It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!'s
Content Quality Guidelines located at: "
Nothing has changed. Same site. Same code. More content.
The only potential "change" was an upgrade to a better host with a new cluster of load-balanced servers.
We've never, ever done anything to conflict with the guidelines.
I also contacted support and got the canned "you may have violated one of our quality guidelines message". Nearly a year later Yahoo still regularly crawls my site, hitting pages that haven't existed in well over a year. I've seen hundreds of other people with the same problem, but no one can find the solutions. Other than the other people who've gone through it, no one believes it's a problems and you usually get accused of doing something bad or your site really doesn't deserve to rank better than the 60+ MFA sites above you. You also get the usual lecture about Google and Yahoo using different algorithms. I've started several other threads on this topics such as this one and each time think I've got the answer but it doesn't ever pan out. [highrankings.com...] Man I sure would love to find the answer to this one! It's been frustrating to say the least.
So for my wild goose chase on this thread. I noticed several mentions of 301's. I do have the non-www url set up as a 301 redirect to the www url. Not sure when exactly I did this, but it could have been around the same time 14 months ago. Has everyone else who is experiencing this problem set up a 301 for non-www?
Absolutely UNTRUE.
once Yahoo drops a website it is nearly impossible to get it back in..
I have a site that was dropped a couple/few years back. I have written/replied to the canned answers they have sent when inquiring. Twice I have gotten through to a real person finally. They both (almost two years apart) have looked over the site and cannot figure out why it is penalized (they finally admitted it was). Both told me to use the reinclusion form and to make a note of our contact. My experience has been once they have flipped the switch on a site, it seems very hard to get them to flip the switch the other way.
What's really funny is the site has three category listings in Yahoo directory for free. These were placed by the editors after they started charging and were not submitted. Two of the category listings were put up "after" the site was banned by the search entity (they must use Google to find sites).
