21 replies to this topic

[Scottie]

A friend of mine recently got a response to an email sent to Ink/Yahoo asking why a site was no longer in the index:

        [url] is blocked from our index; the heavy use of affiliate content is likely the cause.  Yahoo! wants users to get unique, diverse content for their searches whenever possible.

It looks like Yahoo is manually removing affiliate sites.

[OldWelshGuy]

Yet another grey area to contend with then. What defines an affiliate site? rhetorical question

[Scottie]

IMO, they are perfectly within their rights to remove any type of content they want from their index, but I think this arbitrary and subjective policy is going to cause them problems.

I just did a few searches and came up with tons of affiliate sites... are they removing the ones that are "reported" or do they have "affiliate police" reviewing sites and removing them from the index?

If they can pull it off, more power to them! I just think it's a policy that will backfire unless they can find a way to make it consistent.

[robwatts]

Many affiliates actually do a better job than the sites that they are driving traffic to.

I dont think that they should remove domains simply because they have an abundance of affiliate content.

At the end of the day, perhaps the question needs to be asked, does site a b or c actually add value to their users and their index.

Some affiliate sites are nothing but a series of strategically placed kw's buried in a sea of verbiage that offer little if anything 'unique'. Whereas others add value, by complimenting their providers content with additional stuff, and IMO deserve their place in whatever SERP that they seek to target.

Seems odd that they would selectively remove some sites whilst leaving others, unless of course those that remain are far superior...

Edited by robwatts, 10 March 2004 - 07:56 AM.

[Jill]

Usually those emails are automated. It's very probable that the site is not removed, but not showing up because it's the same as a hundred or a thousand of other sites.

I would hazard a guess that if you make your affiliate site completely unique, you wouldn't have much problem.

If I was an engine, I certainly wouldn't want hundreds of pages with the exact same info.

Jill

[Scottie]

Hmnn... it wasn't an automated e-mail. It actually responded to some questions sent by the site owner. I didn't post it all.

[MakeMeTop]

Yahoo/INK does not like affiliate links!

I think I mentioned this some time ago.

Remember that the people reviewing sites are Overture and Yahoo editors and tend to apply the same rules they are used to.

[Scottie]

My question is more along the lines of, what prompts a human review?

Specific SERPs, spam reports, algo flagging affiliate-style links and queing up a bunch of sites for review? Why do many avoid review and some get targeted for removal?

[Jill]

I would guess that it would be automated. Easy enough to flag the dupe content.

[MakeMeTop]

People who submit via PFI are more likely to get a penalty than sites that are naturally crawled. PFI sites are all reviewed - free crawled sites are subject to random inspection, so are far more likely to get away with it.

[robwatts]

Maybe not so easy Jill.

Ive worked on domains that are fed from huge databases distributed to 1000's of other domains.

These db's can be 'played' with to create all sorts of unique variations of the same.

All the spider 'sees' is a mishmash of words within various tags. The frequency and variation of words is seldom likley to be the same, especially if the site owner has taken a little care to ensure that such things are minimised.

Interesting thing about the aff links though Barry, maybe it is algorhythmically detectable. Maybe they count the frequency of outward links to a singular domain and penalise upon that basis. Then again, maybe they dont

Wheres that trusty old <form> tag...

I could be wrong, and the evidence of the current serps doesn't back up my opinion, but I'd say that they periodically look at a random sampling of page one results and prune domains that don't fit their criteria.

For site owners that are dumped, the term victim of their own success springs to mind!

[Grumpus]

Yahoo/INK does not like affiliate links!

Of course not. Yahoo already offers the products you are listing (or if they don't, they are working on the deal right now). Why would they want to send people to your site to give the credit when they should be going directly from Yahoo's pages.

G.

[Dyan]

Sorry, I'm editing because I posted then realized how very off topic my comment is. Guess that I'm still reflecting on an exchange I just had with a DMOZ editor over the term "unique content".

Edited by Dyan, 10 March 2004 - 07:12 PM.

[darciusrex]

Yet another grey area to contend with then. What defines an affiliate site? rhetorical question

I'm curious about that myself. Any takers on OWG's question?

[Scottie]

The site owner got another email that stated Yahoo was looking at implementing a webmaster review process in the future to dispute banned sites... that's a can of worms waiting to be opened!