Forum Moderators: open
We recently purchased a large, well established site (about 20,000 pages of original content) that (for various reasons - no balckhat, just spammy stuff like too many affiliate links, etc.) had been banned from the Yahoo Search Index about 3 years ago (according to the former owners).
The site is listed in the yahoo directory, but - despite having 10,000+ inbound links, and ranking very well every where else, could not be found anywhere in Yahoo when searching for it. The front page and only the front page was crawled 1-2 times a day by Yahoo/slurp, but no other pages were crawled.
After refreshing the site and updating it quite a bit (not to mention removing virtually all affiliate links), to include adding RSS syndication to the original content (which got picked up by several RSS hubs), we submitted a verbose reinclusion request, outlining all we thought the site did wrong, and everything we've done to improve it.
Today, we're getting absolutely slammed by the following crawler:
YahooSeeker/CafeKelsa (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; FreeBSD ; [help.yahoo.com...] (KHTML, like Gecko)
My question is this: Is that crawler hitting us due to the new RSS feed we are providing, or are we about to be reinstated into the search index?
Some doorway page programs such as rankingpower can actually create heavy crosslinking and interlinking by capturing many of your own listings that happen to reside in the altavista search results for your keywords, where the software "borrows" the content. This is what happened to me.
Right now we use a do not follow tag on every link but we've seen in the past that Yahoo does not even respect robots.txt all the time so we are unsure about this.
There are people here who say you should use code so the spider does not follow them. We really are trying not to spam but interlinking is important for our customers and ourselves.
Can anyone give me an example of how to do this?
However, after reading this thread I may have a crack at a reinclusion mail..after all I don't think I am black hat!
Does Yahoo! consider resource/links pages as spamming?
I have 8 of them linked discreetly at the bottom of my index page, should I delete them before I do the reinclusion request?
I can't think of any other reason why they could have
banned me.
actually did you mean 8 pages or 8 links?...
Have your pages/rankings returned after you saw the heavy crawling nearly a month ago?
c
Im wondering if I use that express submit (for the search not the directory) and see if it goes through - then if it gets rejected I can try additional changes and send it back in for free resubmission.
what do you think? I did remove a bug from my site (it was pulling in a content page with broken images and content for 404's - that has been removed but i don;t know if thats why they banned it)
but they wont tell me if that was the problem and I don't want to resubmit it and have it rejected if I only get one more chance - I have a lot of pages in my directory but they are not doorway pages or cloaked or anything - I do quite well with Google and MSN and have thousands of backlinks from just as many web sites within my site category
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:37 am (utc) on Sep. 15, 2005]
[edit reason] Publishing content of emails violates the TOS. Thanks. [/edit]
I tried a reinclusion request, explaining what I thought might be the problem (the server returning a 301 to the home page instead of a 410 or 404). I thought this might have caused a duplicate content penalty.
I explain all this nicely. The above is the response I get. I've done this twice already. Both times I got the same exact response.
My website currently show 860 pages in the Yahoo index, none of them showing a cache. Only the home page can be found when searching for unique content. All but 75 of the 860 pages are showing URL only.
Am I getting a manual penalty or is the algo saying I'm a bad guy. Personally, I would think the site would pass any manual review. It's clean. Any guesses?
<snip>
I read that as you only get one review - it says they are not able to offer the option of another review -
but you are saying you received this email twice? so they have reviewed it twice already?
:X
oh yahoo what have you done...
what have you done?
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:39 am (utc) on Sep. 15, 2005]
[edit reason] Can't publish content of emails. Thanks. [/edit]
Personally, I think this is some kind of algo penalty - not a manual. Slurp still visits our site and grabs pages daily, but at a much slower rate (500 per month compared to 2,500). I know a lot of black hats claim foul, but I'm not interested in that game. (There's too much to learn being a white hat, let alone a black one.)
If yahoo algo is filtering out/banning genuinely good sites, it is really yahoo's loss.
I have seen some really nice sites which sometimes face this problem on yahoo search.
What yahoo could consider is to charge a small fee for a manual reinclusion request - and show the webmaster where the problem is.
What yahoo could consider is to charge a small fee for a manual reinclusion request - and show the webmaster where the problem is.
That's a great idea. Give those of us that want to be included a chance to see what they object to. I am at a loss and so are others that have taken a look.
Keep trying and working to improve your site, that's all you can do.
Webmasters would be tempted to create multiple sites and this is SPAM.
Sad.
This reinclusion thing really does work! Yahoo really listens and gets back to you right away.
THEY ARE GREAT!
Here was my situation. I made some normal onsite optizmation tweaks, changed my title tag and did some internal url page address changes to be more spider friendly. You get the idea the everyday life of a webmaster etc.....
Anyways, right after I made those changes, a day or two later my site was gone from the Yahoo index.
I was shocked! I did not understand what or why I was dropped. I then waited two weeks and still no changes.
Then last night I decided to email Yahoo and ask for them to review my website for reinclusion. I explained to them exactly what I just told you guys and to my amazement when I woke up this morning my site was back online and indexed within Yahoo search results!
I cannot believe it. It was that simple! All this time I was pulling my hair out hoping and waiting they they would reinclude me.
Here is the key. If you have a clean site and you follow the Yahoo guidelines, if you write them they will hear you and gladly help you out.
They are in the business to post highly relevant results on their engine and if your site belongs there, they will help.
THANKS YAHOO YOUR TRUE PROFESSIONALS!
I lost a lot of traffic and sales because of this.
Dear Yahoo Team:
My website [......] was recently dropped from your Search.Yahoo index, and I would like to ask you to please consider my site for reinclusion.
At the time, I was using a doorway page generator called "Rankingpower" to generate large numbers of "keyword" pages, which most likely resulted in this penalty. I have since discontinued my use this program and have completely removed all of it's pages. I have reviewed your Content Policy Guidelines. I apologize for having violated your guidelines and I promise to never use this or similar program again.
Was gone and then requested reinclusion to the Yahoo index and inside of 12 hours I was back.
If you have a clean site then their should not be any problems getting back in.
If you play games what you have done is create a bad track record and it may take a while (a long while) before you are let back in to play.
I think what happened in my case was a simple oversite by Yahoo that was quickly resolved.
My point is that I am here stating a fact. If you want to believe it, its totally up to you. That fact is that Yahoo does respond to your requests. Whether its good or bad.
For example: A "Yes" response is case and point, a request for reinclusion that was granted.
A "No" response is indeed a response from Yahoo telling you they are not ready to let you back in.
What I am getting at here guys is that their were no words or emails from Yahoo indicating that they heard my request for inclusion.
The fact is that they responded almost immediately "without words" but by action, by the reinclusion of my site.
A non response or "No" response is indeed an action or response from Yahoo. Stating loud and clear they are not ready to let you in and play just yet.
No Joke Guys! True Story :))
Was gone and then requested reinclusion to the Yahoo index and inside of 12 hours I was back.
I would be tempted to call that a coincidence. Even if you were reincluded because of your request, many here have said it takes days to weeks to get respidered and reincluded.
C
The stuff that is above me is non related garbage.
Is it possible that a competitor could submit my site every day, for months, then get me booted for search engine spamming?
submitexpress.com has that damn free submit tool, which I am told (by them) is anonymous.
One of my competitors has tried everything (including placing my email address in kiddie porn lists and sending spam using my email addresses) and since April he went from #30 to #2.
Sucks, don't it?
keep my hooves crossed...
inktomi and slurp have not been around so I don't think it looks good...
Cheers,
Broker Boy
