11 replies to this topic

[blackyknoir]

Hello everybody. I have a big problem on my shoulders.

Ever since August of 2004, my site, creditlovers.com, was dropped from yahoo. Till this day, I do not know what I did to be treated like this. I have always followed the rules and i've always been very prudent when it came to the search engines.

I have contacted yahoo on numerous occasions. I switched hosting companies, re-designed my site. I have tried everything. They seem to not care one bit. Every time I send a email, I get this stupid generic response that does not reveal any information on my problem.

Today, I came up with the idea of transferring my files to a new domain. I figured that yahoo has me banned based on my domain, if i switch domains, I should appear in yahoo again.

My plan to get a new hosting account and domain, transfer files from the old domain to the new domain, the directory and file structure will remain the same. After the move has been made, i will keep the old domain and hosting up for a few months with a 301 redirect in the .htaccess.

Here are my tough questions:

1. What is going to happen with all the backlinks i have acquired over the past 3 years?

2. Will I lose rankings in the search engines? I currently have good rankings in google for very competitive terms.

3. How do I go about avoiding a content duplication ban between the old and new domain. Should I erase every from the old domain and simply keep the .htaccess file for the search engine spiders?

4. Should block all search engines from indexing the old site and do a 301 redirect to the new site?

5. Do you think that this could work?

I would really appreciate all inputs. This is a very important task for me. Yahoo is driving me crazy. I hope to hear from you all.

Thanks a million.

[SearchRank]

Welcome blackyknoir!

I just took a brief look at your site and I think your problem is your Links pages. If any of those other sites you are linking to have been banned by Yahoo, then that could be your problem. You also have a series of blank "links" pages such as a "2,3,4,5,6,7..." links at the bottom of your three links pages that essentionaly lead to additional pages with no links whatsoever. Yahoo may look at these as "worthless" pages or even pages that are "under construction".

Look into those two items, fix them and I bet you will be included in Yahoo once again.

[Randy]

Welcome blackyknoir !

Here's your base problem as I see it. From a very quick look at your site it appears that it is for all intents and purposes going to be branded an Affiliates site.

Yahoo! has been the most active in coming down pretty hard on affiliate sites. Their reasoning being that they don't want 20 sites offering the exact same thing from the exact same companies dominating their SERPs.

Unfortunately, because of this stance there isn't going to be much you can do that will help in the long term. Sure you can get a whole new domain and start over again, and the new domain may even show up in Yahoo! for a little while. Eventually though, it's probably always going to be removed from their index.

Add to that what David said above and you've certainly got a hard row to hoe. Especially if the vast majority of your outbound links are the same sort of affiliate links that I saw on some of your normal pages.

I know it's not the answer you wanted to hear. But if they've booted you because you've been branded simply an affiliate it's going to be very tough to get included in their index again.

[blackyknoir]

Thanks for the input SearchRank and Randy.

For your comment searchrank, the extra link pages that i have included on the bottom of my links pages were recently added, as of 2 weeks ago. The did not exist back in august when i got the ban. It may become a problem in the future, so i will take care of that. For your second theory, on linking to pages that have been banned from yahoo, i have never heard of that. Maybe that could the culprit. After checking the first 2 sites i link to, i see that one of them is banned from yahoo too. Another thing, if one of the sites i link to is banned from the serps, but still in the yahoo directory, should i continue linking to them or not?

For your comment Randy, what must I do to not label myself as another affiliate site? There are many more affiliate sites, in my niche, that are still listed in yahoo. My site isnt purely affiliate links, i also have a ton of content. I only have about 10-15 affiliate pages, with about 1-5 links on them. But at the same time, i also have a ton of content that my visitors find very useful. A lot of my visitors come for the content.

Edited by blackyknoir, 09 March 2005 - 05:10 PM.

[blackyknoir]

If the problem is indeed because i have affiliate links, do you think that there is a way to mask my affiliate links? Im sure that Yahoo has some type of bot that recognizes affiliate links. If i can find a way to mask my affiliate links, would they still see me as an affiliate site?

[SearchRank]

For your second theory, on linking to pages that have been banned from yahoo, i have never heard of that. Maybe that could the culprit. After checking the first 2 sites i link to, i see that one of them is banned from yahoo too.

We had a client that had linked to a handful of sites that had been banned from Yahoo. In fact, they were all linking to eachother. The client removed the links, we sent a re-inclusion request and the site was allowed back in the index.

[blackyknoir]

The client removed the links, we sent a re-inclusion request and the site was allowed back in the index.

This sounds very promising. How long did it take for you to be allowed back into the index? 1 month, 6 months, a year?

I really hope this does the trick. The funny thing is that when the yahoo spider visits my site, it grabs the robots.txt, and then the index page...after that, it leaves. How will it know that i'm not linking to banned yahoo sites anymore?

[SearchRank]

It was a couple of months after the client had removed the links.

[Mal]

I think my main site got banned from Yahoo because of the affiliate links. I still have lots of links: registered in Yahoo to my main site but the search phrases including the domain name went from number 1 positions to not in the top 100. My question is how do you know your site is banned? Is it like mine where on all known search phrases you saw it hitting in the past it is no where to be found?

Thanks! Mahalo Aloha

[firedog]

Hi -

I had a similar experience a few months ago with a standard corporate site, which was very text based and not doing anykind of SEO or linking spam.

The site went from having top rankings in Yahoo to not being listed in the index. After several times resubmitting etc, I finally suggested to the client that they submit a few important pages to the paid inclusion (these pages had links to the rest of the site and had ranked well in the past). I assumed that a) once they were indexed they would again get good rankings; there was a good chance the Yahoo spider would then follow the on page links to the rest of the site.

Both assumptions were correct. The pages that were submitted to paid inclusion were immediately indexed and resumed their former high positions.

About 2 weeks later the rest of the pages (that hadn't been put in paid inclusion) started turning up in the index, and now are getting high rankings as before.

My advice: put a few pages (like your index page and site map) in paid inclusion.

[Mal]

Hey Danny. I followed up on what you said and it looks like you are right on the money. One of the sites I've been studying in my area has over 200,000 links to it known by Yahoo. They are blatantly affiliate and still sitting on top of certain phrases with number 1, 2, and 3 positions. I found out from a 3rd source that they had indeed paid Yahoo for the ride. It would be like getting hit in the head to do all the work to get 200,000 links to you and get banned because you did not pay Yahoo the 300 bucks to play. ty!

[blackyknoir]

I finally suggested to the client that they submit a few important pages to the paid inclusion (these pages had links to the rest of the site and had ranked well in the past).

When you talk about paid inclusion, are you talking about sitematch or are yout talking about paid inclusion for the directory?