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Within a week, I saw 3 pages indexed by Yahoo. 5 days later my entire site is re-indexed. I am not doing well yet in the rankings yet for my main keywords.
Can you tell us what your think was wrong with your links pages, as seen by Yahoo?
Did you have links to some bad neighborhoods maybe? -Larry
Within a week, I saw 3 pages indexed by Yahoo. 5 days later my entire site is re-indexed. I am not doing well yet in the rankings yet for my main keywords.
I have a similar story. Submitted a re-inclusion request. About three weeks later, robot activity returned to normal and pages in Yahoo cache increase daily. Not a big boom as described by junai3.
Personally, I thought I was wrongly penalized and did not make any changes to my site at all. (I read the guidelines about five times to make sure.)
I removed all the link pages from my site as forum gossip research indicated Yahoo didn't want you to have reciprocal link pages AT ALL. Zip. Zero recip link pages.
Okay...took those down.
I then stripped keywords out of the alt tags, removed my meta keywords completely (in case they thought I was "stuffing there") - and left only a modest description and generic meta titles.
I then resubmitted to Yahoo and got back the standard reply which I "think" is the acceptance letter. It goes something like...(paraphrase here)
The re-review process takes several weeks to complete....We can't tell you why it was banned...Please check Yahoo search to see if your site has been included.
However, this was on Oct. 19. It's now Oct. 31, and I am still not in.
Back story: My site was accepted into the directory in 2001 and appears there. The front page exists in the index but with the directory title/description.
Question: How long does it really take to get back in after being accepted? I read one poster on WebmasterWorld who said it took 3 weeks, but read other forums and above where they say it happened in less then a week.
If it doesn't appear by Nov. 20, I am going to go for the search submit. Is that a good idea?
Is there anything else I can do or that is recommend?
Thanks for your advice in what appears to be an almost impossible situation.
Question: How long does it really take to get back in after being accepted? I read one poster on WebmasterWorld who said it took 3 weeks, but read other forums and above where they say it happened in less then a week.If it doesn't appear by Nov. 20, I am going to go for the search submit. Is that a good idea?
Is there anything else I can do or that is recommend?
It took me three weeek to start to see some progress. Here we are about 2 weeks later and I keep flipping back and forth betweeen roughly 10 and 20% of my site's pages back in the Yahoo cache (95 of 1,100 and 220 of 1,100) depending on the time of day. I do see that number growing each day and Slurp is now grabbing rougly 100 pages a day (pretty normal pace for this site).
Is seach submit a good idea? Depends on your site's objectives and a cost / benefit analysis. Overall, I think it is a bad idea because I've heard of horror stories after deciding to drop out of site submit. But if your business case supports paying, then it's probably a good idea.
Is there anything else? I've learned that you need to be patient these days.
I've heard those horror stories too about search submit.
I'll be more patient and go back over the site in the meantime.
does/did you site use links (recip) pages?
I did some work on my site, and submitted to the re-review process around 12th last month. Got the same auto response.
Now from the logs I can see that last month after the review requet Slurp visited roughly 40,000 times. So far this month only 200 hits, but it's visiting a page or two per hour.
Still not a single page in the search results.
Does all this mean that I've been accepted and I should see the pages soon or should I resubmit?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
Using the site:sitename.com command, look for pages that are in cache.
Grab some unique content from that page and search for it on Yahoo.
If your page is in the results, then it may just take more time before you start ranking. It's been slow for me (talking months, not weeks or days) to get all pages back in and ranking.
There's still not a single page indexed (site: search), yet the bot is crawling pages as I'm writing this. It's been a month now ...
my question was is my site approved now that it's being crawled?
The short answer is crawling means nothing. My site was under some kind of penalty and Slurp crawled it all the time.
What's the ratio of robots.txt:page hits for Slurp? For me, it was nearly 1:1 when the site was under a penalty. Now it's something like 1:20.
Once it returned to normal spidering activity, I started to see pages in the index cache within a week.
A few weeks back I saw some 10,000 pages in the index with the site: search, just a bunch of urls but there were pages. The next day again they were gone... What could that mean?
Last month it crawled all pages, but now it's mostly robots.txt again.
A few weeks back I saw some 10,000 pages in the index with the site: search, just a bunch of urls but there were pages. The next day again they were gone... What could that mean?
I got a lot of hits to robots.txt when under a penalty.
I had URL only listings (lots of them) when under a penalty.
NOt sure what was gone the next day for you. The URL only listings or the entire listing. Quite frankly, this all sounds like some kind of penalty.
Now all those that removed their links page then put it back again after being reincluded put your hands up!
Now all those that removed their links page then put it back again after being reincluded put your hands up!
I made exactly no changes and got back in. I did write a nice note explaining all the measures I took to make sure we were in compliance. Honestly, the site never should have been penalized in the first place.
Now, keep in mind the cookie cutter email that tells you you are back in, never really says you are back in. But it's not the rejection letter either.
THe site that I got approval on today was up for it's second review. THe first time, I left my reciprocal link pages on it and of course, I did not pass that first round. But at the time, I didn't know it was for reciprocal link pages.
Sunday night, (a few months after the first rejection), I resubmitted, but this time I did 2 things.
1. Wrote a long, friendly "speech" about why I think my site was special and unique, emphasized i took down the link pages and stop exchanging links almost a year ago, and plan to never exchange links again (which is true because I think link building is more or less dead).
2. I also gave some specifics of other ways the site is not violating quality guidelines.
Long story short, the major difference from the first rejection and the second "acceptance" - (which is difficult to interpret from their language, but basically means your site is fine now) - is the reciprocal link pages.
After I took them down and submitted for review, I got back "in." - now I just have to wait for the slurp/index to pick them up.
2 for 2 when the reciprocal link pages was the only major issue - is pretty strong evidence to me of what webmasters need to do to get back in.
I got a lot of hits to robots.txt when under a penalty
What were the steps that you took to ensure you were in compliance?
I posted here and was lucky enough to have several webmasters volunterr to look at my site, trying to find a problem. I probably described this as "engaged the services of professionals to ensure compliance with Yahoo's guidelines."
I also did some work on my robots.txt file and fixed a problem with 301 my site was sending users and robots.
For example, if you didn't find a page, the site would return a 301 (found here) and point to the home page (not good). I first changed this to a 410 (gone), then later to a 404 (not found).
The site also had a problem because it was returning a 200 even if the page name did not include a trailing slash. Now it returns a 301 and redirects to the correct page.
I explained that we had addressed these problems which I believe caused a suspected duplicate content problem. I explained how we identified and fixed each problem.
I also modified the robots.txt file to ensure robots could not access duplicate content (if it was generated. For example, a pdf file with the same exact content as the web page.
One was penalized in Google and 3 weeks later, the other one was penalized in Yahoo. I did everything possible to find out the cause for the penalties with little success. I spoke with Yahoo and Google reps at PubCon and SES and got contact information form them. It seems the sites had the same issue on both SE's. So I emailed the SE reps. Google did nothing to help the situation or even respond. Yahoo looked at the situation, took our comments into consideration and we got back in Yahoo!
Google may try to please webmasters by having some cool parties at their HQ (and heck, I have fun at them). But in my opinion, Yahoo addresses real webmaster issues (plus, it is unlikely the Pure lounge will run out of alcohol next Tuesday).
The site also had a problem because it was returning a 200 even if the page name did not include a trailing slash. Now it returns a 301 and redirects to the correct page.
Does this mean that my links that just point to a directory like mydomain.com/directory/ will not be accepted by yahoo (although other SEs do) and that I have to change them to mydomain.com/directory/index.html?
The site also had a problem because it was returning a 200 even if the page name did not include a trailing slash. Now it returns a 301 and redirects to the correct page.
Does this mean that my links that just point to a directory like mydomain.com/directory/ will not be accepted by yahoo (although other SEs do) and that I have to change them to mydomain.com/directory/index.html?
I ended up putting my links pages back online. I cleaned up my links pages making sure that only relevant, useful links for my visitors were located on those pages.
I have done the same for another site - without removing the links pages completely, but have had no luck yet.
I then resubmitted to Google and within 2 weeks my site was back on the second page.
Providing resources for your visitors is a good thing and this is how the web was built. Can't see this being a bad thing...
