I’m having a terrible time getting a penalty removed from Yahoo and need some advice. I’ve had my site for 10 years and have been selling online for the past 4 years. I’m using X Cart with a lot of custom mods. I’ve sent a reinclusion request twice now and get the standard canned response: It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!'s Content Quality Guidelines Please have a look and see if I’m just missing the obvious or if there’s something a little more to it. www.CountryCritter.com Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Todd
Wow, amazing site you have.. I really don't know for sure, but for some reason your pagerank does not follow to your internal pages, That suggests to me that it's some kind of internal linking issue, or a lack of deep external links, which would seem unnatural. I had the same problem, and got rid of many useless pages in the supplimental index, and I came back in Yahoo. Are you subscribed to yahoo search submit basic? You can monitor your homepage (or up to any 5 page on your site) and they will update them on a weekly basis, not every 3-4 months as they do everyone else. It would allow you to make some minor (or major) changes to your site, and see the results much quicker. I would hire the services Lesile Rohde of stompernet, who is by far the authority on internal linking structure of a site, he not only would be able to fix your Yahoo issues, but get you better rankings in Google at the same time
Thanks for the compliment. I launched a bunch of new mods back in May and started outputting all of my html pages to the root. That's why I don't have pagerank on the internal pages yet. I'm not subscribed to the Yahoo search submit yet. I'll have to look into that. I noticed a major slump in Yahoo about a year ago and it hasn't regained any traffic since then. I literally get 2 unique visitors per day from Yahoo now. I'm familiar with Stompernet Brad lives here in Georgia about 30 minutes away from me. If I can't figure it out that may be the best solution.
How many Yahoo visits were you getting before? X-Cart is terrible for keyword density or onpage SEO unless you are using one of the CSS skins and have someone with experience helping you optimize. Focus on Google, start exporting some feeds to shopping engines and build backlinks. When Yahoo gets over itself, you will pick your (I'm assuming) double digit visitors per month back up. Not to be ignorant or anything, but shop owners need to be focused on marketing, and not whether the SERPs love them. Get back on top of the things you need to be doing to convert more sales. The time spent emailing Yahoo could be spent emailing your customers a promotional coupon for repeat business. Do the things that make you money.
Thanks for the advice. I was getting thousands of uniques....then hundreds and now nothing... I was ranked #1 for table lamps and tiffany lamps for awhile in yahoo and then it just died about a year ago. My Google rankings are still going strong and account for the majority of my traffic. I'm definitely looking into more offline marketing and still concentrating on my online marketing avenues as well.
The lesson here for folks is that the SERPs are always fluctuating and changing. You can't stand still. Country, make sure your page titles are optimized, you have a sitemap, and http://yoururl.com redirects to http://www.yoururl.com to avoid duplicate content penalties. Lots of simple things you can proactively do to clean up your site. And look into the DFSEU Mod Rewrite for your URLs. Generating the html catalog is a lot of unneeded overhead.
Country, I think the company is called SafetyNetWeb. You can look in the X-Cart forums, in the Marketing/SEO forum. I believe it costs $50, the install is easy if you installed your own X-Cart. Otherwise, installation is a little more. It takes all of your URLs and makes them search engine friendly, and while some people may argue that is not relevant, I have seen the effect on many of my sites and feel it is a big value in the SERPs.
I looked at the SafetyNetWeb and I also found a SEO Mod from MagneticOne called Advanced SEO. Are you familiar with MagneticOne?
Guerilla, you seem to know a lot about ecommerce.. Really good to read your replies. BTW, You know any good script for link sales like the one used by text-link-ads.com .. i will modify the code of course, but am looking at some framework. It should have some basic control panel for buyers and sellers and stuff. Sorry for hijacking the thread. You looked like you know stuff. you can PM me.
Blogspotter, thanks. I was in e-commerce using X-Cart from 2002~2006. Sorry but I can't help with your link script. I don't think TLA uses a commercially available engine. I would check rentacoder (and other sites like that) to see if people are getting scripts like this made, how much they are paying for them, and who is doing the work.