Links to the website not working on Yahoo

[chris_g]

Hi:
I just wanted to to know if anyone has had problems with the links to their websites or customers website not working on Yahoo.

The website has a number of good listings for specific keywords related to what the company offers. When you try and click on the link the link Yahoo provides is misformed and doesn't indicate that the domain is.

The full URL from Yahoo looks like this but you can see by looking at the end of the URL they don't say what the domain name is: So when you click on it its 404 page not found.

http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=california+wro
ngful+death+lawyer/v=2/TID=E103_60/SID=e/l=WS1/R
=9/H=0/*-http://California-wrongful-death-lawyers.asp

If you notice the URL it provides is missing the domain name. http://California-wrongful-death-lawyers.asp

This problem has only appeared on Yahoo since they switched from Google to using their own spider. I will also add that about 50% of the links on Yahoo for this website do work properly! But why are some OK and others are not?

We have tried to contact Yahoo tech support but have not received a response.

Does anyone know what the problem is or how it can be resolved.

[ronniethedodger]

I have not noticed that at all and I have been through a lot of these types of links at Yahoo.

One thing that I did notice is the Url in that is displayed under the description for that result is malformed as well.

• www.insurance-bad-faith-lawyers.com/../California-wrongful-death-lawyers.asp

As you can see, it does not look natural. This phenomenon may be how the url is referenced at the domain's root page. Is it possible that there is a link off of the domain's root page that has this reference ../California-wrongful-death-lawyers.asp contained within that page, but is actually serving up the correct page to the spider? That would explain the page showing up in the cache at Yahoo, and would explain the malformed Url. I am not familular with ASP, but it could be something in the coding too.

If this is the case, you may have stumbled onto a bug in the way the spider is indexing pages when virtual Url referencing is in use. It is basicly going one level up off of the domain root, which is impossible to do (normally).

I would look for this reference and get it corrected if that is the case. And a letter to Yahoo may help also to get it corrected in their index, if they will do that that is.

[Slurp]

We will look into this. I have reported this to the right people at Yahoo.
Thanks
Tim

[chris_g]

Hopefully "Slurp" can get the problem looked at by someone at Yahoo. The problem is the broken URL on Yahoo makes the site look like its down when its actually not. About 50% of the URLs on this site are broken

Thanks for the suggestions ronniethedodger

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by chris_g

Hopefully "Slurp" can get the problem looked at by someone at Yahoo. The problem is the broken URL on Yahoo makes the site look like its down when its actually not. About 50% of the URLs on this site are broken

Thanks for the suggestions ronniethedodger

Chris - I ran your site thru Xenu link checker and it did not find any broken links at all. There are no links that are referencing up one directory past the domain as I was thinking there might.

There was however a broken link to an image referencing http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye...ept3_r2_c1.jpg

Please note the backwards reference in this case. While this is not a reference for the page you are having a problem with ... perhaps there is a connection.

Here is where that image is referenced, which includes the page you had mentioned:

• toxic-exposure-litigation.asp
  serious-injury-lawyers-california.asp
  site-directory.asp
  california-personal-injury-lawyer.asp
  insurance-bad-faith.asp
  bad-faith-and-insurance-companies.asp
  California-wrongful-death-lawyers.asp
  products-liability-attorneys.asp
  Los-Angeles-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  product-liability-law.asp
  California-insurance-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  bad-faith-litigation.asp
  bad-faith-lawyers.asp
  California-insurance-coverage-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  California-insurance-bad-faith-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  bad-faith.asp
  insurance-lawsuits.asp
  bad-faith-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  California-insurance-bad-faith-lawyers.asp
  insurance-bad-faith-lawyers-attorneys.asp
  personal-injury-lawyer-attorney-Los-Angeles.asp
  insurance-lawyers.asp

If this list is comparable to the one you have made for the malformed links in the Search results. Then it may be easy to fix on your end so that the spider is not fouled up. Please let Tim know if this is the case so he can inform the appropriate people about this.

What is unfortunate is if you do find the problem (or Yahoo does) either way you will probably have to wait til Slurp comes around to crawl again. I would plan on quite a spell between now -- the time the problem is isolated and fixed -- then the crawl -- and getting it into the index.

If you are in the Inktomi/SiteMatch program the time difference between the fix and the crawl can be minimal ... if not, then as much as seven weeks according to Yahoo's definition. The only unknown is how long the fix will take.

[chris_g]

While looking at the information ronniethedodger provided I noticed something that Yahoo has indexed the same pages mulitple times.

If you do a search for the pages that are indexed on the website you come up with something very unusual.

It seems that Yahoo has indexed most of the pages on the website 3 times. Once the right way, once with ../../ (and the domain name missing) and once with /../../ (and the domain name missing)

This website doesn't use directories for any of the pages that are listed. All the pages sit right on the root.

For example here are the listing for the site directory (there is only one real site directory page)

Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory
Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory Serious injury lawyers California Insurance bad faith and coverage dispute lawyers. We fight insurance bad faith, insurance company or HMO abuse for individual ...
http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye...-directory.asp - 23k - Cached

Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory
Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory Serious injury lawyers California Insurance bad faith and coverage dispute lawyers. We fight insurance bad faith, insurance company or HMO abuse for individual ...
http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye...-directory.asp - 23k - Cached

Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory
Viau & Kwasniewski Site Directory Serious injury lawyers California Insurance bad faith and coverage dispute lawyers. We fight insurance bad faith, insurance company or HMO abuse for individual ...
http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye...-directory.asp - 23k - Cached

The worst part is in many cases the webpage that Yahoo displays is one of the ones with a mis-formed URL and you can't visit the website.

[ronniethedodger]

I can see what you are talking about. The cache version link is showing the correct page though (which does not help I know).

I was hoping that maybe it was referencing problem that could be fixed on your side, but it appears to be something run amok in the Yahoo index programming. You are going to have to sit tight until somebody there figures out what it might be.

[Slurp]

This problem did not have anything to do with slurp but how the extremely long urls were truncated on the SERPs page.
Thanks, Tim

[chris_g]

slurp wrote:

This problem did not have anything to do with slurp but how the extremely long urls were truncated on the SERPs page.
Thanks, Tim

Thanks for your response slurp. I see that the URL in the example is fairly long but I am wondering if that explains the examples below. Your insite is greatly appreciated.

I just have a few questions that would help me better understand the problem or help your resolve the issue.

When you do a search on Yahoo for "California insurance coverage attorneys" you get a listing for a page name of the same length listed in the Top 10 and that URL works properly. Would the problem not occur on this listing as well.

Some of the really short page names are showing up with problems as well.

"california product liability lawyer" results in a listing for this page. http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye...bility-law.asp

Since Alta Vista switched their results over a few weeks ago we are seeing the same problem with page names as well. A search on AltaVista for "California insurance bad faith lawyers" results in a listing with a bad URL to http://www.insurance-bad-faith-lawye.../bad-faith.asp.

The domain name is 30 characters long. Is the length of the doain name too long? It was my understanding that domains up to 57 charaters are fine.

Thanks for your help.