Banned from Yahoo! and MSN

[NewComputer]

Good evening gang,

I was curious, a friend of mine has a very deep and well put together website that has recently been dropped from Yahoo! and MSN. I kinda knew this was coming because of what I thought would be considered duplicate content. I told him I would try to help him get an answer as to getting re-indexed if possible. Their bots are still crawling the site(s).

The duplicate content is something where there is similar copy, then anywhere between 1 and 30 cities, towns or counties mixed in and then more similar copy. The products are very functional and are of great use to society. I don't want to get into too much detail here in the forum and I would be more comfortable dealing with a few of you via PM. This is a very sensitive matter and is affecting people's livelihood (as any ban from SE's would when that is where most of your income is from).

I would be happy to go into more detail if a couple of you want to contact me and I can give you a little more info. I am working with him to correct the problem, but I am at a bit of a loss as far where to start. I know copy needs to be rewritten, but who do we contact at Y and MSN to find out the reasons etc... Thank you in advance....

PS: He is my main employer and I have never done any SEO or design work for them. He is just asking me to try to resolve this if I can.

[joeychgo]

Is your friend Prbot.com?

Assuming its not - from what I know about being banned, the only fix is to change the problems asap - and if you dont get back - you have to change the domain name and start over. Feel free to PM me if you want

[DarrenC]

A friend who works in the same industry as me but in the US had the same problem with duplicate content and was banned from Yahoo. He ended up dropping the website with the duplicate content which like you was mixed with other content.

He fixed the content problems and then contacted Yahoo! who were not very forthcoming and the website has never got back into it's index. He ended up just scrapping the other site and concentrating on the other one.

Like Joey mentioned though get the problem resolved ASAP whilst its still spidering the site and see what happens.

Not very helpful I know :(

[NewComputer]

Thanks WWH,

They will not drop the site. It is a benefit to the public for us to continue to try to service. The problem is, the majority of our traffic is internet. When Y dropped us, it cut our traffic in half and with no MSN, we are missing alot of traffic.

I appreciate everyone's help.

[joeychgo]

Build a new site on a new domain name and even a different server and keep both for awhile. Make sure the new site is original - in all ways

[DarrenC]

They will not drop the site. It is a benefit to the public for us to continue to try to service.

If that is the case has someone not tried to contact Yahoo? Explain the problem, and plan to get it resolved in x hours - they might be sypathetic depending on the nature of the website / effect it'll have on the public.

[joeychgo]

Here is a more realistic statement:


If that is the case has someone not tried to contact Yahoo? Explain the problem, and begged to get it resolved in x years- they wont be very sypathetic regardless of the nature of the website / Yahoo doesnt care about the effect it'll have on the public.

[schlottke]

Joey, not true.

I had a client who was banned for duplicate content (they were moving domains and had not brought the old one down yet) and after a call it was fixed in under 48 hours.

[joeychgo]

No kidding? Thats the first time ive ever heard that.......... EVERYTHING else I have ever heard is that you might as well get a new domain and start over.

[NewComputer]

If that is the case has someone not tried to contact Yahoo? Explain the problem, and plan to get it resolved in x hours - they might be sypathetic depending on the nature of the website / effect it'll have on the public.

They have not tried to contact Yahoo! or MSN because they are not sure who to talk to and I believe they believe this is an algorithm thing, but I am almost sure it is not. MSN has not indexed the sites for almost 2 years and Yahoo's last update had us dropped.

[DarrenC]

MSN has not indexed the sites for almost 2 years and Yahoo's last update had us dropped

2 years? It's getting spidered too? PM me the URL if you want (up to u) and I'll see if I can anything that hits me - with my limited experience.

[schlottke]

Maybe we've gotten extremely lucky with the Yahoo support- but I have yet to be pissed getting off the phone with them.

[hans]

MSN has not indexed the sites for almost 2 years ....


did you reapeately submit pages to MSN search ??
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

msnbot is stoneage old tech - slow and you have to submit every page - NO deep crawling - just like in ..x. century

but they do crawl if you submit and submit page by page
one URL per day
but theif counter sometimes fails to count to one - hence you may submit 3 or 7 or 9 or x pages - depending on moonlight, sunshine and tidal state ...

never expect fresh data - just be happy to have some pages IN msn-search even if old like mine ..
presently msn brings 0.16% of referrers - with some 40% of pages known ..
meaning i get approx 133 times MORE direct requests ( 21.37% ) than msn referrers ...
but every tower is constructed of billions of sandcorns,
thus is huge success nothing but the sum of many small steps toward goal.

as to Y
for the first time - may be in all history - Y "knows" more of my pages than G - so verified before yesterday ...
about march/april this year Y still had only about 30-40 % of G number of my pages ..
old of course - no steady refreshing like G - but for Y ( slurp ) a huge progress toward freshness and relevancy .. if all else correct and efficient as well.

[SEbasic]

PM Me with the information NC... I'll take a look...

[dirtdog1960theone]

Build a new site on a new domain name and even a different server and keep both for awhile. Make sure the new site is original - in all ways

joeychgo do you mean diifferent from the first site or different wrt itself?

obtw the lincoln on your page is hot! I thought caddy them beat in style. Looks like Lincoln has tried to catch up.