What’s up with yahoo?

Hey arkyt,
Thank you for posting this. I have seen some changes at Yahoo recently. Some of my sites have been banned there for a long time. It really sucks because I did paid inclusion into their directory for these sites. If you type the keyword casinos in at Yahoo you will notice that the first several results are land-based casinos. I have plans for building new sites soon and I really don’t for the first time have a clue as far as seo. It’s a total mess out there. I have been looking at sites today at Google and Yahoo trying to determine what direction I should go in. For once I am really frustrated.

There seems to be a lot of speculation as to why sites are being removed at yahoo …

Some people are saying its based on previous PFI listings not being renewed … I did submit to inktomi long ago. Maybe that’s why I received a penalty – who knows?

Some people are saying its because a site is affiliate oriented – this doesn’t make sense to me due to the current make-up of the SERPS for my keywords – hell they are all affiliate sites heh!

Like you Allan, I am growing more confused every day as to what tomorrow has in store for us. I think we might need to rethink our business models and then rethink them again.

Some crazy times we are going thru right now – cant wait for that Casino City suit to go our way!

Some people are saying its based on previous PFI listings not being renewed … I did submit to inktomi long ago. Maybe that’s why I received a penalty – who knows?

That is the reason in my opinion that our sites were banned.

Its certainly possible but I think absolutely rediculous if they are zeroing out sites with aff links.

What would happen is it would push over onto the sponsors to track all incoming traffic without the aff code installed.

ie follow the player back to the site he originated.

This would be a disaster imho on many levels.

And its about the stupidest thing I can think of to do; what motivates sites with quality content IS the affiliate!

IDIOTS! don’t they know that nobody in their right mind is going to spend the kind of countless hours needed for researching information if there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

If this was to true and to catch on with other SEs what would inevitably happen is the net as we know it would basically cease to exist in trade a few really large websites which were still getting paid as an affiliate but likely they’d be paid upfront much in the way Gambling.com used to charge casinos to advertise on their site.

and that’s what you’d have for nearly every subject is a few big sites like gambling.com providing all the results.

The rest of us simply would not be able to afford hosting after a while; although some like myself would maybe last a little longer because I don’t rely on SEO traffic; but eventually even those like me would not be able to compete as we continued to lose ground on places we were able to advertise.

there are ways to get around these things but they won’t be easy and many would not make the necessary adjustments to survive.

regardless, it wouldn’t be an easy go of things for the most of us.

I hope that isn’t true cause it is soooo STUPID!!!

I dont think its got anything to do with “affiliate sites” thats just conjecture by conspiracy theorist ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

So let me conspire for awhile :rollever:

I think since I didnt transfer over to sitematch I was put on a blacklist and banned! Horrible to think, but it adds up for me!

I recall getting several emails about the time they were switching over telling me about the great deals they could offer if I transfered over – of course I didnt and today EVERY site that I had submitted PFI into inktomi is now GONE from yahoo!

PLEASE note that my sites are also gone from every one of the other engines that PFI was supposed to get me into …. very telling!!!!

I do NOT operate any link farms! ALL my sites offer unique content – and yes of course they contain affiliates links, but I dont think those links are reason for exclusion.

I wrote them earlier today – hopefully I can get a response early next week – if not Ill email them again! Then I will call!

If their attitude is “if you dont want to buy into our product we wont give it to you for free” then I am going to be pretty Fn irritated! For sure this is looking like the case to me!

Time will tell ….

arkyt, when your inktomi contract expires you are supposed to fall out of the index *if* you haven’t been found by their free crawl on its own.

For example, if your site had zero inbound links, when it ended its inktomi contract it would be a 100% certainty to fall out of the index.

I would guess that these sites have a lot of links and should have been found by the free crawl, but perhaps they only have a few and you need to submit the site.

Another possibility is the free crawled page(s) were last crawled a long time ago (months). The content of those old pages, when they were free crawled, is what you will be ranked on… so if you added a bunch of stuff about igloos since it was last free crawled, Yahoo won’t know about it and won’t know to rank you for igloos.

I’d be curious to know one of the awol sites if you want to say.

Well that would be encouraging news and I reckon a plausible explanation …

Let me get you up to date … I submitted using Marketleap to inktomi back in Nov 2003 – Firstly, I thought that was good for 1 years placement – secondly it wasn’t until this afternoon I discovered the sites I had submitted to ink were no longer in yahoo (I don’t monitor that type of thing) They could have easily been removed months ago, when yahoo first took over inktomi.

I believe that to be the case since my marketleap login is no longer valid. I emailed ML today asking them why they terminated our contract – I should ask for a FULL refund!

The sites that were nixed all have plenty of high quality links – a few of the sites rank very well on google and have now for some time. I assure you that they are not link farms and they unique content updated daily M-F …

Thus, I would assume that Yahoo would have picked me up via one of listed sites linking to me. So the theory about not being crawled after having my PFIs dropped doesnt seem likely to me.

Its late and I’m rambling on and, on and, on – incoherently at that – so Ill let you spin a web or two.

========

I just found some more data …

“I was informed at the beginning of this year that all of those pages would be honored until the time expired in all the search engines that used the Inktomi database except for Yahoo. If I wanted to get these pages into Yahoo that I would have to sign up for the site match program to get those pages back into Yahoo. “

Ok I think I recall that being in all those spams about the new system from ML, but that doesnt explain my absence from the other engines – I guess since ML deleted my account that I could have been removed from all those engines as well ….

ok now why havent I been picked up via the free crwal? maybe I need to get some homepage links from sites listing well- but DAMN I dont wanna do homepage links – :rollover: WAIT that wont work if there is in fact some sort of ban – that explains not being picked up yet despite numerous quality links!!! GRRRRRR

MAN I need some shuteye …

For what it’s worth…

Yahoo is crazy unpredictable for me. I did the paid inclusion route awhile back only to have all but one site rejected. Luckily they refunded the money, no harm done.

But as far as non-paid goes, its still whacky. Some sites get indexed, get the positions they deserve and hold them well. Other sites with very similiar SEO related quality will get indexed but are almost blacklisted from day one. To make things even more interesting in the Yahoo puzzle, some sites can be in the Top 10 for a period of time, then they are gone for awhile, then back to Top 10 and back and forth forever.

This is based on first hand experience with my own sites, not conjecture. Just today one of my pharmacy sites was #6 for a competitive one word keyphrase for about 2 hours and then its gone again. This cycle has been ongoing for me for about 6 months with no end in sight to the sillyness. When Yahoo favours you its all good, but it doesnt last for long.

I have not seen any evidence of affiliate sites being targetted specifically. I’ve tried making some sites look as non-affiliate as possible ( hiding aff links via php scripts etc.) and it makes no difference at all.

Bottom Line for me: Yahoo is a nice bonus if my sites stick around for awhile, but Google is still more reliable despite its own issues.

I have been doing some major renovation at GamesandCasino and I am being crawled by everyone like there is no tomorrow. Every major engine is crawling me a lot, and most of the smaller ones are too.

I guess I may be able to help some people out by exchanging links for crawling purposes. I am willing to do that with quality, well ranked sites. It could be mutually beneficial.

I think we need to do it while I am hot – I am still working on the makeover and have several weeks to go. I think the engines may simmer down once I quit with the major changes.