Can Adding a Blog Hurt in Yahoo?

Hi -

Looking to see if anyone can shed some light on this situation:

1. I have a regular site which ranked quite well on Yahoo for a fairly competitive term for six months or so. Around Thanksgiving it dropped out of sight and I assumed I was being penalized for something - not sure what. It's a reputable site with lots of original content. Initially thought it might be coop ads, but don't believe this to be so anymore.

2. Even when the main site ranked well, the blog component of the site (which also had coop ads) maintained its mediocre ranking (p 3 or 4).

3. Now the blog has moved up nicely (p 1), but the main site is still nowhere to be found.

The blog has always been a subdirectory (i.e.www.site.com/blog) and I would think that if I was being penalized that would mean the entire domain would be penalized.

Questions:

Do "penalties" sometimes affect only parts of a site?

Can a blog "hurt" a regular site when included as a subdirectory? Is there a better way to go?

Is it common for a blog to overtake its parent site in the rankings?

I'd obviously love to get the main site back in the rankings. Anyone have ideas to the dynamics at work here or suggestions?

Thanks

 

The thing with blogs is, AFAIK and what i have experienced is that it is easier for bots to crawl the blogs than dynamic content .... are you using .html urls or php ones ?

 

All url's are .php

 

Yahoo will crawl your blogs the more you updated.

 

In my experience, adding a blog vastly improved my ranks and crawling in Yahoo. The key is to register your RSS file with My Yahoo and everytime you update the blog, Yahoo will receive a ping and your site will be crawled.

 

my site is made up of one b2evo blog and got almost 3000 refferals from yahoo last month so yahoo dosnt hate blogs and yes they dop rank them if properly optimised.

 

Adding a blog to your website infact will improve the crawling. Yahoo loves fresh content but, just having a blog will not help, remember to update it frequently.

 

Does more crawling improve ranking? Looks stupid.

 

not sure but more crawling = more pages in index so more chance of a page being ranked.

 

So what is the big disadvantage?

Absolutely. The more pages in index the better chance of being ranked.

 

I have had no problems with blogs with the big Y. It hasn't hurt me yet and I have had blogs since the summer.

 

I have wondered if blosg and RSS feeds on My yahoo were messing up rankings, but have decided that eliminating them didn't help. so its back to the blog/RSS