Forum Moderators: open
I've been reading WebmasterWorld for sometime now, but this is the first post I've made. I recently (late March) had a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory via Express means. It is a shopping site (won't get too specific) and at first I enjoyed great success with the terms that were provided in my description. However, I was wondering if people had problems having more than their index page listed?
I can not seem to get Yahoo to crawl the rest of my site, even though their cached index page is up to date. Google, MSN have no problems crawling it & there is no loose code from old css's. The site also has a full Site Map linking to every single page.
All that is listed on Yahoo is the Title & Description from the directory, and a current cached page. Is there someone or an email you can use to contact Yahoo (or is it even worth trying)? Also would it be easier just to remove my Directory listing altogether?
Sorry this is so long. Thanks in advance for any help or insight people might be able to give.
Darryl
Any ideas?
I would double-check your "robots.txt" file if you have one.
That's the thing! I've submitted sites to their search before (non-directory) and they all got fully spidered. Is the directory a rip off or something? Mine's a commercial site, and as time's gone by, it's slipping farther and farther down the ranks, with no new pages being spidered. My income has dropped about 2000% from it (maybe more.. I dunno.. a lot anyhow).
Thanks for the help tho guys... anyone have any other ideas?
Darryl
One of the things I have noticed on my sites that are not indexed is that Yahoo seems to have 2 instances of my index. If I search for just 'mydomain.com', Yahoo returns 2 homepages.
I know this has been mentioned as a problem elsewhere on the forum, have you looked into that?
As far as the Yahoo directory, it used to be a popular place to get listed. As the SE's got better and Google rose to fame, the Yahoo directory became less an less used by surfers. It's value today is pretty much just in having the link to your site for other SE's PR ratings.
I have several websites in the Yahoo directory (one of which was banned by Yahoo in February - God and Yahoo only know why). I will NOT be renewing any Yahoo directory listings that require further payment as the value is much less than their annual fee (some sites are grandfathered before the annual fee was instituted). They should reduce it to about $29 one time with no annual charge to make the cost relative to its value today.
I only have one copy of my site showing when I do site:www.mydomain.com.
With regards to Yahoo! bans.. how does this occur? I *may* have overzealously submitted the site at one point (ie. once a day for like 5-10 days) because I was frustrated that the Directory wasn't picking up all the pages, but that's about it. There are some affiliate links on it, but each page has enough content on it to outweigh that I think. I also stripped off all alt tags on images, only one H1 per page, 1-2 H2s and maybe 1-2 H3s, I only target 1-2 keywords per page (aside from the index which targets about 5-6), and they only occur in the H1 and 2-3 times in the content text.
Completely baffled how you can pay $299, get listed and not slurped.. I could see it if they refused listing me, because then it would have something to do with the content, html etc.
Is there any value in removing the site altogether, licencing a new domain, putting all that content back onto the new domain and just submitting it to their SLURP once and only once? I don't get good results from google/msnsearch as is (although google has all my pages indexed, and msnsearch about 10%).
Thanks again!
Darryl
1. You've paid for a directory link, you might as well keep it.
2. If it has been spidered and indexed by Google then it'll probably be sandboxed - but the clock is now ticking down to when it will be released.
3. Yahoo are typically slow to index, lots of people have the same experience.
Why not just start another site (without the same content) and see how it goes?
My real concern is for the XMas season, just want to make sure pages are showing up then (both in yahoo & google)
Thanks for the help though, you've given me a lot to think about and some ideas here.
Best regards,
Darryl
One thing I would say about your directory listing is that your homepage will appear in the Yahoo results with the same title used in the directory. If they have given you a good title for your directory listing, then that will be to your advantage. However, more often than not you'll be listed with your company name or with a title that won't really benefit your ranking. So although a directory listing in Yahoo is a solid enough investment (?), in some ways you are actually not helping yourself.
The only domain I have listed in the Yahoo directory ranks well in their search engine, but that site has been around for years and has thousands of backlinks. Even though it is listed in the Yahoo SERPs with it's company name for the title ... it still does well.
You may find that starting another site without a Yahoo directory listing is the best thing to do, especially if you are going after some competitive phrases where you will need control over your title tag.
