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Yet, in another post we see that Yahoo is "old & Stale" and never re-indexises and never changes its algo?
Give us a break peeps......
Here on WW we get to read that Yahoo never changes, Yahoo changes too much, Yahoo is old, Yahoo is outdated.
The story is simply a load of nonsence.
A few years ago, our company's website suffered an Inktomi penalty. This mystified us since we are a 25 year old company with 180 employees and would never do anything underhanded. Many, many sites suffered similar fates.
Then Yahoo purchased Ink and started using their crappy results. They simply transfered the Ink penalty and our site disappeared completely from Yahoo's search results, even for our company's name. We have written Yahoo several times and have gotten zero response.
The number of quality sites that rank well in G and MSN but cannot be found in Yahoo ought to be of concern to them, but it is not. They continue to bury their head in the sand and operate like a typical monopoly.
As an investor, when I see a company needing to expand through acquisitions (read Overture), alarms go off in my head. While this purchase decision may have been a strategic one, I wonder what Yahoo's results would have looked like if you extracted the Overture income?
I'd bet it would demonstrate a company on the decline. Google is a lean, mean, focused competitor while MSN is a rising tide. Like everything else, quality would win out in the end and my bet is on these two tigers.
If I had Yahoo shares in my portfolio, you can bet I would start dumping them.
Can someone tell me besides having our host set up the 301 redirict, are there other things I must do within the site?
Again...is this www vs non-www and 301's a smoking gun on Yahoo?
Excellent post.
How the do I get indexed? I've submitted a urllist.txt but nothing. Inktomi Slurp has looked at a few pages but nothing. Yahoo denies blacklisting us.
Msn has quite a few pages from our site indexed but they don't show up in their search results. The only way to find the indexed pages is "site:".
There is no reason at all why our site should not be listed in the top 10. Plenty of unique content, a quality design, unique features, and no blackhat tactics. We are a manufacturer, not an affiliate.
We're sending this package to Jeff Weiner Senior Vice President Search and Marketplace as well as David and Jerry the two founders in the hopes that we can get some attention on the problem.
We just spent 500K on a new site and I'll be damed if I'm going to just accept that we have to spend 5-15K a month in the PPC just to get listed, certainly not with the crap they are listing on the first and second pages.
Anyways I'll let you all know if this has any impact. I figure a FedEx delivery to several senior level people may have more significance than an email that can be deleted and ignored.
Here's hoping anyways.
Signed - A VERY frustrated webmaster
Whilst as a fellow webmaster and designer i can understand your frustration if you read Yahoos terms and conditions they do not "Have to list your site" nor give any reason for the way they organise their serps nor "is it yout right to be listed.
We work on many sites, some rank well, others dont alots down to the content the owners put in, the way its presented and the quality of the site and its backlinks.
Sure we would like all sites to rank well in Yahoo and believe that all the sites we work on are top notch sites in their own way and should all rank top of the serps for their respective authority but then again so does every other webmaster!.
If you do site:www.yoursite.com in Yahoo, you can see how many pages you have in its index
next do linkdomain:www.yoursite.com in Yahoo to establish how many back links you have in it.
Then compare the results of that to the sites that rank in the top ten of your sector. If you are light in these areas its time to work on the weak area. Also note how many results you are competing against, it may take longer that you would imagine to start ranking - are you in the Yahoo directory?.
IMO for what its worth it may be your site that has the problem not Yahoo. It could be that your site does not have some of the factors that Yahoo is looking for?.
All in all Yahoo is not msn, Google, teoma or any other search engine for that matter. It has its own algo and you need to be aware that what works for google doest work for yahoo.
At the end of the day, im not defending Yahoo as i fully understand the frustration having had sites in the past of our own that didnt rank, some of them now do, others dont but we have a good idea what they need, but your letter and details to yahoo imo will prove to be a waste of time and thats simply because they dont have to list anyone - to guarantee position you need to buy it via overture and they make this very clear in the webmaster notes
If i were in your position i would spend your time working out what to do to improve your site so that you start ranking better in the future.
Whilst this reply doesnt help resolve your ranking issue im hoping you can see this as it is.
Im sure Yahoo have nothing against your site and even if the chairman of Yahoo Europe thought your site was the best site on the entire web he would be unable to do anything to assist it ranking due to the number of factors that go into the algo that no one man can control - hence why all your letter is likely to get is a sorry you are not satisfied, confirmation if you are or are not blacklisted or at best an engineer will look to see if your site has any obvious spider issue problems but if your site is listed in Yahoo (even if its position 1000) its not a spider issue.
All the very best of luck to you
Rich
P.S if you want to sticky me your url i would be happy to have a quick look at your site to see if anything obvious needs addressing and give some pointers on the areas to work on which could help you to rank better
This domain was never banned from Yahoo, else a site:www search would show nothing.
I get the impression that Yahoo directory listings don't count for as much as they did, and that Yahoo is giving more weight to megasites and subdomain crosslinking schemes such as About.com's.
I agree. I also think Yahoo is where Google was about two + years ago before the Florida update. The Google SERPS were dominated by spammy sites and "directory" type sites which were really just lists and more lists. Their keyword density tolerance level was also about double what it is today.
What used to work on Google, and MSN also worked on Yahoo. The difference is that Google and MSN have moved on with new filters and algos. Most webmasters (who are not SEO's) have realized what works best for them on Google and MSN and (after much hand wringing) have gone with the flow and adjusted their sites. Afterall, G&M drive the majority of traffic.
Unfortunately, Yahoo has not kept pace with the other engines and tend to reward keyword stuffed sites and as EFV said, megasites and subdomain crosslinking also works. The same old sites using the same old stuff which was accepted practice back two and three years ago are at the top of the SERPS.
To me, its like looking back in time when I search on Y.
Last summer, I immediately pulled all my spam pages from my domain that wasn't caught, but the possible penalty (if there is one) did not occur until weeks after I removed the offending pages and cleaned up my site. I can't imagine a penalty being meted out after a site was cleaned up of all it's blackhat stuff.
I'm afraid to ask Yahoo about my situation, because they might decide to do something worse, or I might say the wrong thing. A few months ago, I did ask them if my use of a wildcard character /*.* in robots.txt could have caused the problem and they replied that it likely did since wildcards are not supported by the robots exclusion protocal.
Isn't MSN much smaller than Yahoo? I read it's only 10% of the market share.
I'm not sure how I should word my message. I should probably be honest and admit to having earlier used 'rpower' software to generate directory-style pages even though I stopped using it 8 months ago.
The company I work for had hired an SEO (before I started), who must have done something (he did get them involved in some sort of linking scheme), or it was something they had done in-house with the site, but in any event it resulted in the ban.
Previous to this they had enjoyed decent rankings for their core keywords. Then with the above ban, all listings were dropped. When I contacted Y! to enquire, they just gave me the generic email along with a quote about search engine traffic being a "gift". While I generally agree with this, coming from a rep from a company who we are paying over 10K a month to rubbed me the wrong way. I know PPC and Organic are two separate divisions, but I don't care. I still think its arrogant and just plain rude.
When you consider we are an actual manufacturer and have been around for almost 20years, and then look at the 90% directory crap sites in the serps for our keywords, you have to sit there and scratch your head wondering how not listing our site would possibly benefit Yahoo's search users. Especially since we've launched a brand new 500K site with so many unique features and content it'd make your head spin. I can however see how it benefits Yahoo – we now have to bid on all our terms and spend even more money. And I’ll be sure to ask them in my FedEx package if this in any way is what has motivated the “ban”.
I know SEO pretty well (been at this for 6yrs) and I know the site isn't breaking any rules. (No bad inbound/outbound links, no repetitive keywords in content, meta, etc..) The site is so clean you could eat off it. So from a technical and TOS stand point, there is no reason for them to not list the site, unless I am a complete moron and have overlooked something.
So this, coupled with the last 4 months of trying to get someone at directory support to help us update the 6year old listing we have, has pushed us to take action. For all the money we spend with this company I just can't believe this is how they choose to treat good customers and their search users.
If you do have a penalty you can’t make it any worse, so you want to go through the motions. First thing to do is confirm the penalty with Yahoo. To do that go here;
[add.yahoo.com...]
Skip over the ridiculous instructions at the top about entering in a unique sentence in quotation marks and see if your site appears. The fact is all sites remain in the index even when penalized, so this exercise is pointless. Scroll down a bit and fill out the form, if you think you know the problem, clean it up and tell them so.
You will get a response from Yahoo with a vague statement like, “your site may not meet the Yahoo guidelines”, get anything other than a direct statement saying you are not penalized, and you are penalized. The most they offer in terms of an explanation is to go look at their guidelines at; [help.yahoo.com...]
If you get confirmation you are penalized, try and fix the problem, don’t assume anything. The majority of sites that are penalized are due to some sort of linking scenario, or they are connected due to a common server. You may want to read this here; [research.yahoo.com...] this came out just before there was a big wave of sites penalized. Best I can gather from it is they run some sort of query looking for linked sites, or common servers (pretty clumsy as in there’s a lot of babies that go out with the bath water).
After you have addressed what you think the problem might be, (and again you have to get off the “there’s nothing wrong with my site thinking) There probably isn’t in terms of Google, but the issue is Yahoo, and some sort of filter was tripped, or a hand penalty applied, so something caused the penalty to be applied, fair or not. You’re out until you change it.
Once you get to the bottom of it go here; [add.yahoo.com...]
This is for requesting a second review on your site. You want to be careful with this, the guidelines say you get two looks and that’s it. They will give you more but DO NOT submit your site unless you are very, very confident you have fixed the problem, because most likely you have not.
Good luck and the most productive thing you can do is try and figure out what they didn’t like, and not keep thinking there’s nothing wrong with your site, and it’s all been a big mistake. It’s not about right or wrong, or proving a point, it’s about getting your site back in. Also don’t cry about ranking, keep the focus on the penalty. You can’t rank when you’re penalized so that’s got nothing to do with it. And lastly be nice, it’s their search engine and they make the rules.
It's entirely possible my "resources" reciprocal links pages might contain a few links to bad link partners' sites. I have no automated way of checking them, so I would have to manually check each site which would be very slow. I have one links page that ended up with 41 links. I could ask Yahoo about it.
Last month, I did put in a "User-Agent: Slurp Disallow: /resources/" in my robots.txt for now but I don't know how much good that will do. Sometimes spiders don't always obey robots.txt.
If I know I am guilty of having used spam software in the past, but removed all traces of it long ago, before the penalty occurred, should I still admit to it when contacting yahoo?
My site is an affiliate site since it makes money from affiliate programs, but I completely redesigned it as a content site with the affiliate stuff must less obvious. Before contacting Yahoo, maybe I should first remove my Google ads from my homepage.
Dear Yahoo,
It appears my site: http:/www.********.com may be under some kind of penalty. a Yahoo site:www.********.com is only showing my homepage as 'Cached' and none of my other pages on my site are being indexed. I also noticed a large number of dead links in your index to pages I removed from my site last summer.
I'm not sure what could have caused a penalty, but I admit that in the past, up until July 05, I was using a program called "Rankingpower" to generate directory-style pages. I have discontinued my use of this program and removed all it's associated pages long ago (back in July) and I have since rebuilt my site as a real content site with lots of unique hand-written content.
I have been involved with reciprocal link exchanges for a long time, but I'm not sure if my reciprocal links pages could be the problem http:/www.*********.com/resources. Earlier this year, I put in "User-agent: slurp
Disallow: /resources/" in robots.txt. I currently have no automated method of checking my link partners for bad sites.
Please let me know if there is a problem with my site I need to fix to get re-indexed.
Sincerely,
************
This is no small KWP either, G shows:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 53,900,000"
So it is a very, very competitive KWP.
Funny part is, I have no idea why I moved up in Y! during this latest BS/shake up over there. I'm thinking it has everything to do with so many other sites dropping out of my way...
[edited by: martinibuster at 1:46 am (utc) on April 4, 2006]
[edit reason] Profanity [/edit]
Dup content concerns?
Now keep in mind that we really only have Google, MSN, and Yahoo as the major players in the search engine category. Everyone else is either running deep runs randomly every other or few months or running light runs (such as Ask) each month.
Most of the "search engines" use a different database which includes Yahoo's. So why would words appear with high ranking that use Yahoo's database on say Hotbot or Dogpile but not show up in Yahoo's own search? I think macneil has the idea. While they all share the same database of crawled information I believe Yahoo in this case is trying to squeeze some income based off of the SERP inconsistency. However I honestly think this will hurt them in the long run.
As far as I am concerned I rarely check Yahoo's rankings. I'm so unimpressed by the lack of response in ratio to it's exceedingly high crawl rate (five times that of MSN and sometimes up to TEN times that of Google some months) that I have seriously considered just outright banning Slurp. However this would effect third party search engines that yield fair SERPS plus I have tons of bandwidth to burn.
Search engine shares are much different from browser shares but if Yahoo keeps this up they'll become the Netscape 4 of search engines. I do not find their results very useful personally.
I am a Google user and typically will several times a week get P.O.ed and switch to MSN to find something I can't on Google. None of the search engines are particularly good at multi valued string searches. Lots of times I'll have to put bobs example widgets as bobs "example widgets" with quotes though the average consumer will not know to do this!
John
After months of the same pages appearing in Yahoo (even the ones that no longer exist) I cleaned up a few things (spcifically my robots) and sent off the review request, 24 hours later... bam... Yahoo picks up all my new pages and removes the old ones.
Brilliant.
Now to work on getting some better rankings...
Does Yahoo ever lift a penalty upon request without sending a reply to the website owner?
I am caching properly however. Maybe you just need to give them a bit more time?
Anyway I'm happy Google has at least finally updated my backlinks and pagerank after waiting 4 months. Still waiting for a flood of Google traffic to start coming in.
I have asked them but just got the canned response which is not much use.
I am wondering if the problem is caused by the site being on a shared server, perhaps there are alot of poor sites hosted on the same server which is pulling my site down?
Is there a common thread to this problem?
One does have to realize that Yahoo is a very different company that Google/MSN. Yahoo seems more marketing oriented (as opposed to technical) and search doesn't seem that much of a priority to them. That may sound rediculous to many because Yahoo is perceived as the "arch-search engine", but it's only quite recent that Yahoo produces it's own search results.
What they do have is that wonderful website with all of it's different services that they bring into to surfer's view very well. In that sense they are miles ahead of Google.
By and large, the errors in Yahoo's algo are probably of minor concern to the corporation as a whole.
