Forum Moderators: open
We have Search Submit Basic, where we (stupidly?) paid $245 to have our sites tracked. Our 5 URLS were doing fine, but as of April 7th, they turned up as "Ineligible" because (can't remember the exact wording) but "URL matches existing URL in system". Of course I emailed Yahoo support four times, no response, but on my final email to them where I basically PLEADED "PLEASE EXPLAIN", the URLS are now showing up as status of green check marked "Active", but still the "Last Refresh" is April 7th.
The Slurp bot is hitting my site over 2,000 times per month, twice as much as Google, yet I am getting 1 Yahoo search hit for every 80-90 Google seach hits. Even MSN/Live is beating Yahoo by a factor of 10-20.
I don't know if there's anything I can do or not, but any insight is appreciated. We've spent over $20,000 paying content writers so far and have done NOTHING for SEO! No white hat, no black hat! We're just working on a LONG TERM site with tons of useful information over hundreds of different topics. No adult topics, no copyright issues, no anything like that. Basically we don't exist according to Yahoo, whereas just 2 months ago Yahoo was our best friend.
Any thoughts?
I thought we weren't allowed to post links?
Correct, you're not. But how many links from other related-topic sites do you have to your pages?
We ... have done NOTHING for SEO! No white hat...
IMO, in today's competitive search-ranking environment, "white hat" is required, and often, a bit of the grey... (and my intent here is not to start any off-topic white/black-hat terminology bickering).
Often basic SEO consists not of adding or manipulating things to make your site do better in search, but rather in avoiding common mistakes that make your site do worse. Unique and accurate meta- titles and descriptions on each page and an efficient and thorough on-site navigation system are good for starters... Canonicalizing URLs to avoid duplicate-content (search WebmasterWorld for those terms if not familiar) and verifying correct server response codes under all conditions is another. Making sure your keywords and keyphrases are not "buried" in images is yet another.
Jim
The statement about not doing any SEO interested me because it leaves open the possibility the OP may have been deficient in obtaining links.
It's notable that Yahoo is the main source of traffic. All things being equal this wouldn't mean anything but traffic between Google and Yahoo are not equal. Google's traffic should be several times whatever Yahoo was sending, especially for longtail. The situation of Yahoo sending more traffic than Google might be a symptom of whatever is slowing down your traffic.
What's the rough ratio of inbounds with/without anchor text?
Are the inbounds heavily weighted from certain kinds of sites? (i.e. forums, blogs, directory)
Are inbounds one-way, reciprocal, or three-way?
Are you doing any kind of interlinking with sites under your control?
3 or 4 to 1
> Are the inbounds heavily weighted from certain kinds of sites? (i.e. forums, blogs, directory)
20-25% are from forums/blogs, 15-20% are from social networking sites, digg, stumble, hugg, etc, 15-20% are from internal links from own site.
> Are inbounds one-way, reciprocal, or three-way?
All are one-way. No reciprocal or 3-way. And NONE requested.
> Are you doing any kind of interlinking with sites under your control?
Only internal links to related pages.
I can't help but wonder if somehow Yahoo is simply now finally treating you exactly like Google does.
This observation is made due to the VERY unusual fact that you get so little traffic (historically) from "G" while getting so much from "Y". MartiniBuster pointed this out, if I understand his/her remark above. Google being a symptom of what is hurting your traffic from Yahoo.
In fact, I'm certain the two streams of traffic are acting the same way now for similar if not exactly the same reasons. The fact that Google was faster at detecting whatever is wrong with your site than Yahoo is typical. Google is faster and more thorough at detecting "spammy" issues with sites, or at least some that LOOKS spammy.
Look into whatever has been wrong with or possible fixes for your Google traffic.
That should fix what is wrong with Yahoo traffic. And, there is a MAJOR side benefit...
The traffic you end up getting from Google should be MUCH bigger than anything little Yahoo has been sending you.
I also think, speculation based on anecdotal evidence, that Google has more sophisticated backlink calculations and that Yahoo's are more primitive. The preponderance of .gov and .edu sites in certain searches, imo, speaks to how they're weighting sites, both favoring and not-favoring them, as well as discounting links.
The other issue with Yahoo is that the engine does not seem, imo, to understand individual pages as well as Google.
Anyway, on that site, which has 1.4+ million dynamic pages BTW, Googlebot hits it an average of 50,000 or more times/day. Yahoo Slurp come in only 500 or so. Jeeeeeesh.
The site is heavily indexed with many thousands of pages shown in Yahoo and over 3 million shown in Google (they include some old amazon product links to build that list).
And, Google runs roughly 85-90% of the daily visitor referral traffic, Yahoo is only 0.8%, while Ask runs about 5%. MSN etc. fall below Yahoo.
I don't buy clicks for this site. No paid advertising into it at all.
So, the real visitor referred, organic traffic roughly follows the bot traffic, percentage-wize anyway.
I think that the winning traffic from SE's is due to the SE's ability to fully index all of my pages, and to deeply crawl each page. I think that ability is not as related to technology, but in fact comes from pure muscle... more computers, faster connections, better and deeper crawling, more frequent crawling, etc.
Google now wins due to more money working for them vis-a-vis hardware and pipes. Mainly.
I also think their algo is smarter.
So, I'd spend a lot of time fixing Google traffic. When you fix that, you'll fix the rest of the organic referral volume.
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:19 pm (utc) on May 22, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics. [/edit]
[edited by: martinibuster at 11:16 pm (utc) on May 22, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics. [/edit]
In regards to our site falling out of Yahoo search (almost completely), one thing I've noticed recently is that when keywords DO show up in Yahoo search, they are showing up in subdomain main pages and not in the relevant lower pages. Say for example I search for "Blue Widgets" in the Yahoo SE, and even though I have a 3 page article on "Blue Widgets" and the Title of the article is "Blue Widgets Are Making a Comeback" and "Blue Widgets" are mentioned 25 times in the 1500 word article, that page (or pages) is nowhere to be found in the top 500 Yahoo SE results, but on page *1* in the results is the subdomain main page (index.html) that is "widgets.domain.com" where in the meta tag "Description" of the subdomain page it says "Red widgets are one of the things you can find on this website, along with blue widgets and yellow widgets"
THAT page ranks high, the "widgets.domain.com" page, but that actual html pages that (I think) should rank high, i.e. the actual article about blue widgets, is nowhere to be found.
Any thoughts at all before I totally give up on trying to figure out Yahoo? (and *please*, since I can't direct you to the site to see for yourselves, just take my word for it, that this is a non-spammy website that is not trying to game or trick any search engines! Serious quality content)
