What are the Signs of a Yahoo Penalization?

[ichthyous]

Before the collapse my Y! traffic was almost as high as Google, but it vanished overnight and never came back.

When I run a site:search Yahoo has 3,500 indexed pages from my site, mostly well indexed with descriptions titles etc. Slurp visits my site fairly regularly...why after three years do I still not get any traffic from Y!?

When I run very specific searches for content that is indexed I still don't come up. Is there any way to know if you are being penalized for sure?

Today I ran a search and the top three listings from my site were all old subdomains that I don't use anymore...should I 301 redirect them away? Thanks!

[edited by: martinibuster at 6:28 pm (utc) on May 30, 2006]
[edit reason] Added paragraph breaks. [/edit]

[randle]

Is there any way to know if you are being penalized for sure?

Yes, you can ask them.

[add.yahoo.com...]

[followgreg]

When you are filtered usually your site:www.domain.com will not return your homepage first. < --- that is for their sneaky stuff, OR when they keep on not understanding how a simple website work....either or.

I can not tell for sure it is accurate though.

[ichthyous]

Yahoo has three of my subdomains at the top of the list. I have heard that this can cause problems. Should I redirect the subs to my index page? I used the email form to inquire about my status...lets see what they say

[Hobbs]

Here is a better question:
I rank in the top five in many competitive keywords returning tens of millions of results, and still Yahoo! brings in less than 5% of my traffic. That tells me that no one is searching Yahoo in my very broad niche, but I would love to hear better explanations.

[phantombookman]

Hobbs
same here, I have sites ranked in Y and MSN at #1 and #2 for 20-30 million returns and wikipedia sends me more traffic than the 2 engines combined.

In my area there are no search engines, there's Google.
Most people think that microsoft is the thing that makes their computer work.

Google is running at up 97% of searches for me!

[ichthyous]

Yahoo used to bring in a lot of traffic to my site, but that was three years ago. I think it's really only the yahoo portal page users that use Yahoo search as well. People don't go to Yahoo specifically to search for something on the internet, but they will use yahoo's search box if they are already at Yahoo reading news, weather, email, etc. I rank much better in MSN for some terms and I see very little traffic from them.

[Hobbs]

According to comScore in April 2006:
[biz.yahoo.com...]

Google .. with 43.1 percent of all U.S. searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent

So this is either nonsense, or US searches are highly very local, but still:

a) Some of those searches have to be going international
b) If I am getting US traffic from Google then according to the above I should get at least half that much from Yahoo too, which is not even close to the 1/20th I am getting from Yahoo
c) Even if Yahoo and MSN searches are conducted by people checking their mail or playing games there or whatever, the disproportion tells me that the figures above must be very inaccurate and Google's share of the pie is at least 80% from where I am sitting.