"Banned" sites ranking for one major phrase

Why do they do this?

[crobb305]

Is it handcoding that allows webpages that are "banned" from Yahoo to show up in the top 10 for major search phrases? Could they do this for testing, to determine a site's merit when considering penalty removal?

I am just confused by what I see. Do any others see something similar?

I can't discuss the specifics, for obvious reasons.

[timster]

I get most of my traffic for my biggest site from Google, some from MSN, barely and from Yahoo -- the site's buried in the SERPs for most searches.

But some of my pages rank quite well in Yahoo for their appropriate search phrases: these are all pages that are linked to by DMOZ (with the search phrase in the DMOZ anchor text).

I'm guessing Yahoo generally dislikes my site, but "trusts" the DMOZ links enough to override that in specific cases.

[soapystar]

crobb...you saying that permanent?...or just every so often?

[ddogg]

I was experiencing this a few weeks ago but I'm back to fully banned status (still home page only, but no rankings). Why I'm banned who knows, Yahoo drives me crazy.

[crobb305]

Soapy, I am seeing these "banned" sites ranking in the top 5 for a major phrase, and have been for over a month. They don't even show up on searches for their respective, unique names, and no internal pages indexed. A true ban, but for some reason they were hardcoded (it seems) for a single phrase.

I am wondering if this was to allow for some data collection (user movement through the site).

Otherwise, it is completely inexplicable to me. The sites seem perfectly appropriate for free search or SiteMatch, and are in the directory (one of which is a category sponsor).

[soapystar]

i don't know the yahoo setup but i get the feeling that the various elements that make up the serps as a whole are pretty removed from each other. It would be no real surpise to find one section hand coding a site without even realising its banned. Or knowing its banned and having no way to unban it.

[goodroi]

are you sure you are not seeing a penalized site that was then added to sitematch?

[otc_cmnn]

I have experienced this first hand.

Yahoo! Handcodes results for certain high voulme terms, especially terms that are saturated with SPAM.

One of my sites used to be fully indexed 100k+ pages and ranking well for thousands of terms. As well as being #1 for the top term in the niche (200k+ searches a month on the YSM Keyword tool). Then one day the entire site got banned (f'd if I could ever figure out why). All of the pages were removed from the index and I did not even show for a search on www.#*$!#*$!X.com --- Buuuut, I still had the #1 for the big term, using my DMOZ/Y!Directory description and title.

Eventually, after much moaning and no result, we signed up for sitematch and spend $500 promoting 10 URLs. Slowly over the next three months our site was reindexed. I stopped funding the Sitematch account and here we are six months later. I have 49600 pages saturated, but NONE (Read 0, zero, nada, nil, null clicks) of them generate any traffic except the hard coded term. The rest of the terms in the niche are riddled with more spam than ever.

So, I was completly banned and there I was #1... Now I might as well be banned because all slurp does for me is eat bandwidth, but there I am... #1. Is it because I am so good damned good looking? I doubt it...

[tictoc]

I am seeing this also. Yahoo is a strange bird. It lets in all the spammy (sub-domain) blogger sites to where they completely contaminate the serps but hand-codes a few good content sites where they are restrained to move anywhere in Yahoo but one term. Yahoo has chained us up so we can't move.

[crobb305]

Again, the site(s) are in the directory, category sponsors, accepted into YPN, etc, yet still "banned", even rejected from SearchSubmit (Sitematch or whatever they call it). So inconsistent. The pages are obviously "good enough" to get handcoded, at least in the eyes of whoever or whatever placed them there. Why not release them from the permanent ban?

Goodroi, in response to your question, these sites were rejected for Sitematch after they were removed/banned from the serps 2 years ago. They recently returned to the top of this particular query within the past 2 months and have not moved since.

[soapystar]

you could ask...why are these sites now so hard to unban yet if you got in early when the change happened (from google)and had some clout in these forums (like some mods)the yahoo pr guys were unbanning them for you.