Seeing the same thing here. Sites with tens of thousands of BL's that used to be Top 5 for lots of phrases have fallen out of the Top 100. Found one site with 1,500 that still ranks.
I have found many with > 20,000 that still rank type in any competitve terms like "mortgage" there are some sites with a lot less backlinks ranking though
I had a site that ranked #1 in Yahoo on over 200 keywords; in search queries with over 20 million results returned. Site up for 3 years. Thousands of pages indexed AND 1.4 MILLION BACKLINKS. Completely gone. I mean disappeared. I don't rank in a search for my domain. Here is the kicker. I am still being indexed daily and my page count and link count keep going up! lol Plus I'm still top 3 in hundreds of keywords in Google and MSN. Go figure. I finally just broke down and paid the $300 to be included in their directory. That was 2 days ago and I haven't heard back from them yet. I did have GoogleAS on the site, not that it means anything but some people have made some references that many sites that have AdSense are being booted. I have since taken every ad off the site (at least until they manually review it). Yahoo accounted for nearly 50% of my traffic at the time. We'll see what happens. There seems to be no reason to this maddness. It has effected big and small sites.
I have done this for years. However I will NOT renew again with them. Their SERPs are the biggest mess I've ever seen. I am sure, in time this will all be corrected. It really seems like overkill to axe an entire group of domains that appear to have a rather robust quantity of Bl's. In my case I was running both AS and COOP on several sites. I think they ARE certainly punishing ANY type of what appears to be link scheming...unlike Google's devaluing. Can anyone in this thread confirm that they were NOT blasted by Yahoo, with a link scheme in place. The reason I ask is, out of my 40+ domains the only ones that remain visible in Yahoo are the ones that were NOT involved with any link schemes. When I say schemes I am NOT referring to purchasing links as I do not agree with this. My link campaigns include DP COOP, LV COOP and reciprical link building software. EDIT Seems like a pretty clear mesage from Y
Yeah, evidence definitely seems to be pointing to a specific type of links that are causing the problem. Sites like Monster.com have 491,000 BL's, yet still rank #1 for high-traffic general terms like "jobs."
Yes, I can confirm... I have 8 domains. 7 domains was dropped by Yahoo, the only one that still ranked (#1, #2 KW) is the only site I don't care about and has no links from Co-op or Link Vault.
Just had a thought: might not be the co-op, per se, but rather a Yahoo penalty simply for sites who got too many links too quickly, regardless of how they got them.
I actually have many sites that have handfulls of links that went UP in the rankings. Many are newer and though they don't have AS, they DO have the coop on them and only have a couple hundred pages indexed. Even my main site that has 1.4 million BLs didn't all come from the coop. I have links from thousands of sites in my industry. Legitimate ones. And almost all of my links are non-reciprocal links. I understand that a site growing too fast could throw red flags, but isn't that also assuming that a site can't LEGITIMATELY grow quickly? What if a company poured thousands of dollars into an ad campain or was the only site about a hot new topic. How many "movie" sites instantly get thousands of links overnight when they promoting the site? How about a sweepstakes that is offered by Coke or Pepsi with a link to a brand new domain? Or a professional sporting event like a PGA tour event. How about the official Olympic site that suddenly gets millions of links weeks after launching? Or a natural dissaster that is suddenly the #1 topic on the planet, like the tsunami? How about the Pope dying? There are thousands of legit ways a site can explode overnight. So, to penalize sites that just simply have a lot of links or even that they got a lot of links quickly seems quite irrational to me.
I hate say it but a lot of my older sites without coop or LV, just lots of reciprical links seem to be doing okay. Some fo them got kicked too but if I compare sites with coop to sites without, I would say copp seems to increase the possibiblity. Of course I just enrolled 2 more sites in the coop so screw it. I asked earlier about yahoo checking whois, does anyone know if they do? Also is it possible it has to do with run of site links? If you look at the backlinks the coop creates, you tend to get a bunch of links from each big site. I still see sites with run of site links rankings but maybe they only have a handful. Also over the last couple months yahoo has cracked down on blog spammers, perhaps whatever they use to identify them, lots of links fast, is what is hurting coop sites with lots of weight.
half the blog spams come from dead blogs that I am sure have not been updated with the no follow. You sort of watch the life span of blog as it goes from a real site to just total spam o' rama see the progression http://justworldnews.org/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=966
I could be wrong, but I think it would be pretty damn hard for SE's to separate co-op links from other types of links. Is it possible they penalize for what I've heard referred to as "link churn" ?
Heh, do you run an older movabletype blog? Or even a newer one... I don't think a lot of spammers know about nofollow, or care about it, because we got hit a tons by spammers until we started generating a random image of #'s.
Wow extremely poor results at Yahoo when using a variety of shopping related search phrases. An abundance of spammy, keyword stuffed results. Would turn anyone away from Yahoo. It seems that when searching for common phrases the results are not too bad but anything obscure returns less than favourable results.
Is here someone in this forum who has now good rankings and has not a paid service from yahoo like paid directory inclusion, webhosting, overture, paid mail storage etc. I doubt it but we''ll find out the truth.