Yahoo Pulled My Rankings - Why?, Could it be the dreaded Dupe Content? Options

[lpeyton]

Hi all,

I recently had a listing on Yahoo in the #10 position for a certain phrase and I wanted to try and do better - so I copied the page and added in my root directory instead of a folder - figured that would make it easier for Yahoo to find me. Well, now neither page is listed at all!!! Could this be because they had some filter for dupe content?? It seems extreme to me.
Any thoughts?
One of the pages are still ranked in MSN and Google - so they had no problem with it!
I changed the page location per below, here's the second page I created:

www.domain.net/first-thursday-portland.html

And the first :

www.domain.net/art/first-thursday-portland.html

As I thought the page NOT in the folder did much better in the rankings, but now I'm not on Yahoo at all!
What should I do??
Thanks for any advice/help -
Lisa


After more research I see that Yahoo isn't listing ANY of the other pages that were located in the /art folder!
Boy did I piss them off or what??

[qwerty]

I'm afraid it was a mistake to move the page to a new URL, mostly because there's just no reason to do it. But if you're going to do such things, you absolutely need to tell the search engines that you've done so by setting up a 301 redirect.

I'm sure you didn't piss slurp off. It's really not a very emotional spider. You may have confused it a bit, though.

At this point, choose one page, delete the other and wait for it to get found. If you're going to choose the newer URL, add the 301 from the old URL to the new one to your .htaccess file for the sake of any user-agents that come around looking for it.

[Jill]

Most likely it was a coincidence.

Was this a brand new page?

[lpeyton]

Hi Jill,
Yes it was a new page.
There are about 4 other pages in the /art folder and none of them show up in Yahoo anymore...it seems strange they would pull them as well.
Thanks for your help!
Lisa

[lpeyton]

Hi there,

Thanks so much for the reply. I chose to keep the older page but since MSN lists the newer page I should create the 301 back to the old page, I guess. And this was really an experiment, I wanted to see if putting the page in the root directory instead of a folder would make a difference in my rankings. And it did make a difference. I guess what I learned is to not use /folders unless absolutely neccessary or make sure my keywords are in the folder name as well.

Now off to figure out how to do that redirect...I AM green!
Thanks -
Lisa

[lpeyton]

All done - that was easy!!!
So cool, I now all about 301's!
No sweat!
It worked like a champ - so I can keep my rankings in MSN.
Thanks again,
Lisa

[qwerty]

I wanted to see if putting the page in the root directory instead of a folder would make a difference in my rankings.

As far as search engines are concerned, what matters is what they need to do to get to a page, not where (ie, how deep) it's located in the directory structure. You can have a page five subdirectories deep, but if you link to it from your home page, it's only one click away. If that page links to another page in the root directory (and it's the only link to that page), guess which one gets indexed first.

[Jill]

Yes it was a new page.

Then don't worry about it.

[lpeyton]

Thanks for the help guys - but the plot thickens.
So after doing more research on google analytics, I now see they aren't listing either page either.
They were at one point as I was getting quite a bit of traffic in from those pages.
They were listing the newer page back in April and then the older page as recently as May 7th...but today neither page comes up. WHY NOT??? I'm totally stressing here.

As for the linking info, Q - so what you are saying is that if a page buried in folders is linked to from the home page that page will do better in the index?? Interesting. My boss didn't want me linking to the /art pages directly from the home page so I had to create links on our blog - that got the pages indexed. The newer page I created I linked to from the blog as well.
Hmmm, maybe I'm overlooking something here...I was updating the blog recently - could Google have spidered while I was updating and missed those pages???

Jill - why do you say not to worry about it since it was a new page?
Thanks,
Lisa

[lpeyton]

That can't be it because Google is still indexing the other pages in the /art folder - just not the first-thursday-portland page. Once again, I'm surprised that I got penalized this way.

[chrishirst]

YOU'RE NOT PENALISED IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM!!!!!!!!


You moved the page, now they have to find it again

My boss didn't want me linking to the /art pages directly from the home page

Just point out how stupid he/she is by demonstrating the minor damage it has caused.

[Jill]

Jill - why do you say not to worry about it since it was a new page?

Because what you're experiencing is common every day occurence for new pages.

DO NOT WORRY ABOUT IT.

Check it again in a few weeks and it will be fine.

[lpeyton]

I didn't know that pages can disappear like that.
Something must have changed -
Google was indexing the page as recently as mid-april, and then with NO CHANGES MADE BY ME, it dropped the page from the index. So something must have happened. Right?
I checked Google webtools and they haven't notified me of any penalty.
So I'm still very confused here.
There's a buzz on the Google Webmasters Groups about many sites being dropped off the radar...

[

You moved the page, now they have to find it again




[/quote]

Google had found the page and indexed it - it had listed both pages for awhile, and then dropped one of the pages...and now has dropped both.

[qwerty]

Just keep in mind that when you run a search, you're querying one data center. Come back a minute later and you may well be dealing with a different data center. You don't have any control over that, so what may be going on is that your just getting information from locations that each have different answers to your questions.

[Randy]

Google was indexing the page as recently as mid-april, and then with NO CHANGES MADE BY ME, it dropped the page from the index. So something must have happened. Right?

Yes something happened. But nothing out of the ordinary happened. The same sort of thing happens every day to probably several hundred or several thousand sites. Especially with new pages. Even more especially with new pages that don't have a lot of links pointing at them.

So nothing bad happened other than that the page dropped out of the index. No penalty. No anything else. Just completely normal schtuff that happens every single day.

And there's absolutely zero you can do to correct it other than to keep working on your site and your incoming links to make your site more important in the eyes of the search engines. This is a years-long process, not something that happens overnight or in a week or two. So instead of worrying about it stop looking every 20 minutes and stop moving stuff around to the engines have to find 'em again!