Yahoo and the 301 Redirect

Bernard · #1 May 28th 2004, 9:12 am

It appears that Yahoo has made a policy statement with regards to not following / respecting 301 redirects:

Yahoo's 301 Redirect Penalty

**digitalpoint** · #2 May 28th 2004, 9:26 am

Now *that* is comical.

NewComputer · #3 May 28th 2004, 10:39 am

What in the world is Yahoo! doing? Do they even know? There was one person on that page who had 35,000+ pages.... Imagine 'writing' pages stating that the page had been moved etc....

I am seriously losing any respect I may have had for them. It just feels like there is one guy who was just promoted within the company into a position of importance and has made all these terrible decisions.

I am laughing so hard write now I am starting to cry.... make it stop. Any suggestions on how a large company could handle this situation?

schlottke · #4 May 28th 2004, 10:59 am

That is out of control. Hopefully they read the forums- then they might understand what a 301 actually is...

**digitalpoint** · #5 May 28th 2004, 11:31 am

Yahoo as a search engine is pretty much a joke compares to Google. They can't even handle the "easy" technical stuff (redirects, sub-directories, etc.) How do they really expect to be able to compete on a larger scale without being able to handle the simple things?

SENewbie · #6 May 28th 2004, 11:33 am

I was actually getting ready to post a new thread that I noticed Yahoo updates their listings w/newly indexed pages at approximately the same time Google does and thought that was interesting, but after reading this I'm starting to realize that I don't really care that much about Yahoo anymore and can't really take them seriously till they start fixing some of the obvious flaws in their search algorithm and other things...

NewComputer · #7 May 28th 2004, 1:18 pm

Well, when you have a site that Yahoo is feeding half your business too, you would start caring. A lot of people search Yahoo, so it is only right that they display the most pertinent information. It really is not the way a search engine should perform to display only 'paid' ads.

Owlcroft · #8 May 28th 2004, 2:19 pm

To say that this is shocking is severe understatement. It does, though, explain a lot of what can be seen in Yahoo's results.

They appear to be in a deep nose dive, with crashdown not far off.

mxlabs · #9 May 28th 2004, 3:12 pm

wow that's odd... so yahoo begs for 35,000 doorway pages instead of allowing 301'ing to the new pages huh? so this is how they want to spider the most sites of all

SENewbie · #10 May 29th 2004, 10:39 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by NewComputer

Well, when you have a site that Yahoo is feeding half your business too, you would start caring. A lot of people search Yahoo, so it is only right that they display the most pertinent information. It really is not the way a search engine should perform to display only 'paid' ads.

I don't disagree w/what you're saying but you're speaking hypothetically here...yeah I would care if this were the case for me but it isn't and it never was. I always got 70-80% of my traffic from Google even when Yahoo shared their results.

The bottom line for me is that pages that rank #1-10 in Google don't even show up in Yahoo so until they get their act together and start showing relevant results I don't care and won't take them seriously as a source of traffic for my site.

hulkster · #11 May 29th 2004, 10:35 pm

Yahoo ain't too smart - they are still stripping trailing "/'s" in their search results - for instance, try this Yahoo search for "hulkmobile" and see their internal redirect to http://www.komar.org/hulk/ ... but note they strip the trailing /

Yea, the web server takes care of this for you, but it is an unneccessary redirect on that end ... and the search engine should return the "right" results. Has been this way for as long as I can remember ... but HEY, they are in good company, search.msn.com does the same thing! ;-)

I got motivated to bring this up recently in a blog, so since I saw this thread here about Yahoo not-so-smartness, I thought I'd toss out another example.

alek

**digitalpoint** · #12 May 29th 2004, 11:55 pm

It's not really good, because I have a website that the directories are built with mod-rewrites. People coming in from Yahoo were getting 404 errors (the web server only redirects if the directory physically exists, which it didn't in my case). I took care of it on my end, but still. It's plain wrong on Yahoo's end.

Will.Spencer · #13 May 30th 2004, 3:58 am

Yahoo's (reported) lack of support for HTTP 301 Redirects is even more ridiculous when you consider how slow Yahoo's crawler is.

pk_synths · #14 Jun 2nd 2004, 12:40 pm

DP why not "force" Yahoo to redirect.

Cant you simply use httpd.com to detect if the UserAgent is Yahoo and serve the correct pages and/site? The old indexed pages will stay indexed but at least you can index your new pages or site. An average hosted account wont be able to do this but at least server owner have a step around the issue.

Worked on my end with sessionid issues and 404s.

**digitalpoint** · #15 Jun 2nd 2004, 12:49 pm

Yeah... you could do that. But truthfully, I don't care all that much. It's something Yahoo needs to work out. And I get the traffic because they are redirected on my end anyway.