Yahoo Links Page Hurting Ranks?

Should I Exclude Slurp?

[mrprotein]

My site kicks ace in Google and did the same at the inception of Yahoo but has been beaten down even though they are showing me as 2nd in popularity in my Yahoo category. I filled out the re-inclusion request and they sent me back an email stating my site had a potential problem although the only thing I qualified for in the problem area was having a links page. I see most of the sites beating me for searches in individual, brand name, products I carry are all pretty much junk on a number of levels and most commonly don't have links pages. So here's my simple question: can I block the Yahoo Slurp from my links page ONLY and how should I go about doing it?

Thanks in advance..

[arbitrary]

Even if you block Slurp from the links page, your penalty may be a manual one applied by a human reviewer.

Do you really need the links page?

[mrprotein]

Well that makes sense but I'm not penalized. Just not showing up where I should be in relation to Google MSN & where I was at the initial Yahoo search rollout.

[eljefe3]

I had maybe 20 recip links and have suffered the penalty according to yahoo. Now that they have been removed I recieved the canned reply that it might take a long time to be back in their SERP's.

[theChronic]

I'm new to SEO stuff and have been mostly reading about Google, but from this I am wondering, are you not allowed to have a web links page for inclusion in Yahoo!?

Thanks,
John

[christmasman]

You can and should have quality link exchanges in place. There are hundreds of examples where a competive keyword is contolled by websites with link partners.

Usually what you see from the people posting here are people who don't know what else could be wrong with there site and blame it on Link exchanges or it is there link exchanges because they did not have proper percentages of links / anchor text/ naturals links.

If you exchange with sites you feel your site benefits from being link to as far as adding to the quality of your website than go for it and exchange links. Don't exchange simply for the sake of trying to build backlinks.

[Rollo]

I suspect that links pages will continue to be frowned upon more and more. If you want to trade links, you should integrate them into your content or at least only trade with sites with similar conent. Most links pages are a form of spam really, even though the practice has been widespead for so many years. Having pages on your site loaded down with 100s of off-topic links is just asking for trouble nowadays.

[digicam]

Blaming link pages is lame, there are clearly other problems which he is not aware of.

If the links can be placed in site content then fine, if there is a links page then they should be relevant and include some text around each one of them.

[Rollo]

I don't think its "lame". A links page may or may not be the cause, but from the perspective of the engines, pages with loads of OFF TOPIC links is a form of spam (read: search engine manipulation), period. Not so long ago the engines savaged automated link farms, then hit bogus directories... what makes you think that links pages are so differnt?