Yahoo is Killing Me. I Know Y'all Can Help

[netsnets]

Yes, this is another standard my site is great on Google, but stinks on Yahoo post. However, I feel like my case is a bit severe..

Search Referrals from last 30 days:
Google - 90,009
MSN - 2,602
AOL - 1606
.
.
YAHOO - 287 (or 0.29% of search traffic)

And of those 287, about 240 are searches for the domain name basically itself.

I see no suggestions on yahoo I've been banned on Y or anywhere else (ie, siteadvisor) for that matter.

Yahoo SiteExplorer shows that I have 0 index pages, 0 crawled pages, 0 known pages, 0 anything except for domains linking in (1,867)

However, going to [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com,...] Yahoo is showing 7,267 results for my site.

How can it show 7,267 results in one place, 0 in another?

Am I unwittingly blocking Yahoo's Slurp? (I don't see anything on robots or htaccess to suggest it, though I do have IP's blocked) Am I banned but dont know it? Am I violating some content guideline?

I'm also in the Yahoo directory a handful times too for what its worth

Any thoughts on this or what I can do about it would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Shawn

[robzilla]

Many of us are in the same boat. As far as I know, it usually means that Yahoo! thinks the site does not meet their quality guidelines.

Not much you can do about it, I'm afraid.

[Jon_King]

Is this an affiliate site or have an abundance of outgoing links on the index page?

[netsnets]

Thanks for the replies fellas. It's a pretty standard site of almost entirely unique editorial content. There's no affiliate anythings, and only a handful of outgoing links on the index page.

[directwheels]

Is this an affiliate site or have an abundance of outgoing links on the index page?

Does that matter? I have a couple sites with lots and lots of affiliate links that get decent traffic from Yahoo

[netsnets]

Just got a standard vague email from yahoo support that the site didn't meet their guidelines. have no clue what could possibly be wrong, but I guess I'll resubmit it and hope for the best.

[MadeWillis]

It doesn't meet their standards yet you are listed in their human edited directory several times? What a joke.

[netsnets]

I mentioned that in my response email, but of course "they can't talk about specifics", as if anyone there legitimately knows why

[Jon_King]

>>Does that matter? I have a couple sites with lots and lots of affiliate links...

I was fishing for some answers. I too have seen several long established and high ranking sites drop to the second or third page.

Two of these sites are industry leading and seem to carry an authority status with G, but rank poorly in Yahoo.

I am obviously looking for a common thread which is why the affiliate site question was raised. Not having worked very hard for Y rankings in last couple of years, I have a renewed interest to understand the Y algo.

[shortbus1662]

I have the same problem. No affiliate links, not a lot of outgoing links.

Rank extremely well in google.

Page three or worse in yahoo.

I get very little search traffic from Yahoo! and it blows my mind...it HAS to be some sort of crazy penalty. I'm almost paranoid enough to think it has to do with my Google Adsense ads...

[bwnbwn]

If you have done any 301's in the last year Yahoo is not understanding them at all and indexing both. I know this is why mine went south as I see both URL's when I do a site search.

[caribguy]

bwnbwn: that's not exactly my experience.

For my site, Yahoo correctly references only the new location for pages that have been 301'ed in recent weeks when searching for "unique text in content" site:example.com

Some time ago, to prevent duplicate indexing, we disallowed indexing of URLs that include a query string or reference a method. When searching for "text in title" site:example.com on pages that were indexed before modifying robots.txt, I see references to things like:

hxxp://example.com/old-location/page?printable=yes
hxxp://example.com/old-location/page/customMethod

This does not happen on pages that were added after fixing robots.txt and have later been 301'ed

[bwnbwn]

caribguy have you done both site:http://www.example.com and site:http://example.com to verify this is correct?

[caribguy]

Yes, will sticky you my searches

[Jon_King]

I have checked our 301s and they are fine.

What I do notice is the number of subdomain pages ranking well. Does anyone have some insight on this?