I thought I would pass along my experience with getting reindexed with yahoo. I have one site that was de-indexed by Yahoo approximately 5 months ago. During this time, I didn't receive a single vistor from Yahoo. This site is the only one of 40 sites that wasn't indexed by yahoo- and it was one of my busiest sites and there was no reason for the de-indexing that made sense (to me) - other than it was in a highly competitive sector. I have owned the site since 1999. I submitted reinclusion requests several times over the last 5 months and only received generic responses about how Yahoo doesn't index all sites, blah, blah, blah. So I decided to try paying the $299 fee (for the first time) to get listed in the yahoo directory. Three days after paying their fee, the site was re-added to the yahoo index. All site pages were included. This happened BEFORE I received notification I had been accepted to the Yahoo directory. I didn't receive the acceptance notification until 2 days later. I cannot be sure applying for the yahoo directory was directly responsible for the reinclusion or whether is was a coincidence. When I paid the $299 fee I requested a top level category that was a PR6. I was accepted into a sub-category that was a PR4 and which I didn't feel was appropriate. During the first 30 days you can appeal to have you listing changed, so I requested a change to the category I had originally applied to and outlined the reasons why I felt it was more relevant. It only took Yahoo a few hours to reply and say my request had been approved. So if you apply to the Yahoo directory and aren't happy with the category they put you in, be sure and request a change because it obviously works in at least some cases.
That was certainly a concern - and why I put it off for 5 months. I read another post on DP about someone who was in a similar situation and applied for the yahoo directory, was accepted, and then got back into Yahoo Search by making the case that their site had met the terms for the Yahoo Directory- which are the same for Yahoo Search - and so it didn't make sense they weren't being indexed. I was planning on doing the same thing. Even though Yahoo says paying the $299 non-refundable fee doesn't guarantee acceptance, it appears that most sites are accepted. I was fairly sure they wouldn't turn down my site as it has all original content, is informational only, and isn't an affiliate site- but yeah, I wouldn't have been very happy if I had paid $299 to get turned down.
Maybe you should have done what you friend did, first... and see if you'd been re-indexed. That way you may have been able to save $299!
I'm not sure what you mean. They paid $299 and then asked Yahoo why their site was accepted into the directory but not the search results.
Once you have paid you will always have to pay. I was foolish enough to pay up for an important site during the old Inktomi days and when yahoo took over I had the choice of either paying them for every click my site received from them, even though they gave me no extra relevance for this, or never having another click-through from yahoo. I chose the latter and since then a site which has been top in Google for an important search term for several years has never received any visitors whatsoever from yahoo. Had I never paid I would have been far better off and now that I have over 500 sites I will never, never pay them a penny again.
I receive quite a bit of traffic from yahoo on most of my sites. I was receiving a lot of traffic from yahoo on this particular site before they removed me for some unknown reason. Google is still king. The yahoo directory is NOT required to get a top listing - I have several #1 & #2 listings for competive terms on other sites, but I did this out of desperation caused by 5 months of NO traffic on this site and the $299 is a very small amount considering the traffic the site was receiving BEFORE it was taken out. This is the only site I have paid to be listed. I used to have sites listed in the yahoo directory before it went to a paid directory and they were removed when I didn't pay - however they still rank very well. You can also submit for free, however, I have been waiting close to a year on some other sites I submitted this way. If a site isn't high traffic, or is already indexed, I don't think I would even consider a paid inclusion. I'm just happy to be back in the yahoo search results for this site and don't know if the directory submission had anything to do with it - the timing tends to make it look that way.
Do you have any idea why you were banned in the first place? And did you make any changes to your website prior to paying for the Yahoo directory listing?
I have no idea why I was banned. I made no changes to the site prior to paying for the yahoo listing.
I had minor co-op weight pointing to the site for several months prior to the ban, but I made no changes and the weight is still pointing to the site. I have similar weight pointing to other sites that continue to rank in the top ten on yahoo for highly competitive search terms and haven't had any problems. While I am now receiving some yahoo traffic, I still do not rank well for any competitive keywords on this site - although my pages were just added to the index in the last couple of days and the directory listing was just added yesterday (it takes 2-4 days from acceptance into the directory for your listing to show up).
I forgot to ask you. Did you get your SERP back on Yahoo? Are you ranked at all for any of your KW after getting your site re-indexed? I have couple of sites all the pages are indexed, but no SERP. What good is having all the pages indexed and no ranking...
Everyone have ranking. Maybe not in top 5, 100 or 500.. I thnk that yahoo ranking is important. I was 3 now I am 0 - my keywords are in a middle of nothing.