To my request for a review. I asked them to look at iShopHQ, which used to have 23,000 pages indexed and now shows only the home page (I lost them all in May) and got the standard: "It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!'s Content Policy Guidelines located at:" ... blah, blah, blah. From their guidelines - Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site) Nope - Massive domain interlinking Nope - Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content Yep - all my products come from vendor provided datafeeds and point outm through a redirect system, to vendor sites. Just like Shopping.com, BizRate, PriceGrabber and all the other directories/engines out there - Use of reciprocal link programs (aka "link farms") Nope - Hidden text Nope - Excessive keyword repetition Nope So the only thing it can be is affiliate links. I guess aggregating 450,000 products from 40+ vendors to make shopping easier doesn't count as unique content unless your some other shopping directory and not iShopHQ. The site had been in there for almost a year drawing 200+ referals a day before they dropped all the pages. effing c***suckers have cost me $3K+ per month in income.
Ditto...and I don't think they really care. What pisses me off is they won't tell you why? So I am supposed to review thousands of webpages looking for the possibility of one/ all of the many policy breaches . My post is here I too can find nothing wrong.
Christ. This is scary. Especially for those who've based their livelihoods on this fickle business. Could DP's network ever be penalized? I know most of it is done server side, but is it in any way detectable? (sorry if this is a stupid question)
Yahoo is going to pot. How's your MSN rankings? It won't be long before MSN is the number 2 SE next to Google.
I generally rank much better in MSN as opposed to Yahoo & Google, too. But if MSN became as popular as Google, Microsoft would probably get hit by another anti trust suit.
MSN is very good, but we all know how much traffic that sends. Google is spotty - good on some, not on others. Yahoo was driving almost as much by itself as MSN and Google together. iShopHQ has inbound links from the coop. Almost all my other sites do as well. I will admit that ALL the sites with inbounf links from the coop have lost their yahoo traffic. With DiscountsHQ however, I never had inboudn coop links and it loast all it's stuff from Yahoo too. So I figure what the heack and put link to in in the coop. At least now I'm getting soem MSN traffic. I'm not convinced a search provider can justify using inbounds links as a filtering mechanism. If a sudden explosion of links can get you delisted, then guess what? Sign up for coop and point all your weight to a competitor. Ultimately, I think search providers have to take the stance that webmasters have no control over inbound links, since anyone anywhere can link to anything at any time. The best solution seems to be in the Google patent, wher an inbound link can't hurt, but it can't help either until it's been in palce a certain amount of time and comes from a source that has some sort of relelvance, either immediate or maybe a few places removed in the link chain, to the site the link points too. Personally, I think this is the best solution: an inbound link doesn't do any 'good' until it's been in palce for a certain amount of time. If Yahoo is penalizing sites becasue of inbound links, they are going down a poorly lit path that's going to end with them falling into a pit. Lastly, my understanding of the Yahoo ranking penalty for affiliate content is a manual penalty. Someone looks at your site and DECIDES it's doesn't deserve to be in the index. I think that's a good case for a law suit there. Someone is making a judgement about your site. Since it's impossible to apply human judgement evenly, sooner or later thay are going to penalize the wrong site and someon with some dough will go after them.
If this is the case then we are truly going to see some ugly times ahead, with webmasters effectively sabotageing each other in yahoo's serps. Applying a penalty is a retarded idea, IMHO. Could be wholly out of your control.
Again Google seems to show it's superiority in getting the big picture and developing algos to support this, leaving no stone unturned. On the other hand I don't think Yahoo cares about 'search' as much as Google and this may be why it seems Yahoo has started decapitating webmasters with their eyes closed . I too have concluded that coop weight caused this but I have been out of the coop for one month and submitted to Yahoo for a second review. The response is the same That's exactly what is next (not me ain't got the dough) they are going to piss of the wrong person and action will be taken. To me the biggest problem here is NOT telling the webmaster what is wrong. Can imagine getting pulled over by the cops and thrown in jail indefinately and not being told why?
"To me the biggest problem here is NOT telling the webmaster what is wrong. Can imagine getting pulled over by the cops and thrown in jail indefinately and not being told why?" I think the bigger issue is some people getting penalized and others not. There are plenty of site still in top Yahoo positions that have tons of affiliate links all over. That someone 'decided' to leave them while penalizing others is a big issue that I hoe comes back and bites them HARD.
In a real estate market I am in I have seen Yahoo add sites back to the top 10 that was once ban and now this person controls once again 5 of the top 6 sites for this primary phrase in yahoo. If this is the sign of things to come with Yahoo, I hae to agree that MSN will soon take over the number 2 market share for SEs.
I said that MSN will eventually take over as the number 2 SE. Keep your site ranking well and the payoff will come soon.
Has yahoo been taken over by the ODP? Not being told why your site is being penalized sounds like something they would do.
Well I joined the ranks of those booted from Yahoo. Noticed about a month ago, but just confirmed it recently. I too went through my site, even noticed a bunch of stuff I could make better. Did all my improvements, resubmitted my site and was told I still violated their content policies. Frustrating. I know their policy says they won't re-review a site a second time, but I am going to try one more time.
You know what I'm thinking? Conspiracy theory at best.. but imagine pressure from the big dollar advertisers on the search engines pressuring the search engines themselves to drop other major competition from the indexes for random reasons. This business is becoming more and more fickle.. and with the revenue they're getting from high profile companies, wouldn't you say it's entirely possible for integrity to start dropping?
well im back in yahoo after removing powerlinks & gotlinks from my site i asked them to review my site and 1 week later my site is reindexed but still no traffic , should come in the next few weeks
Looks the same in Firefox as it does in IE6 to me. Do you have a firewall that's blocking some of the ads?
Congrats on your re-entry bloodwrath. Hopefully I can figure out what is wrong with my site and get them to re-review.
All of my "banned" sites were re-indexed last week. All still with no SERP. I'm not sure what it means...