Yahoo And 301 Redirects

[Garrett]

Barry Schwarz of SEORoundTable (and now moderator of the SearchEngineWatch forums - congrats!) brought to my attention the troubles webmasters have had with 301 redirects in Yahoo. Yahoo SiteMatch reps even recommended creating doorway pages rather than using 301 redirects, and I've read that they will treat 301s as duplicate content.

Developers and SEOs use 301 redirects when they change urls. The redirect allows them to keep their old url in the index, with all the same links and all the old ranking, while transferring traffic to the new url.

JohnC at the ihelpyou forum posted regarding a conversation he had with a SiteMatch representative. The rep told him "that 301 redirects do not work at Yahoo, would be counted as duplicate content and penalized accordingly." This post is from 5-27-04.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo posted in WebMasterWorld on the 301 redirect issue in late March, saying that, "we are working on improving our 301 redirect handling. You should notice an improvement in the relatively near future."

His advice to the poster asking what to do? "I would be patient. We are working on it now and I wouldn't do anything on your end."

As I understand him, Tim meant that they're working on how Yahoo handles 301s. The WebMasterWorld poster claimed jumbled SERPs with content from their new site over top of their old url.

Tim made no mention of there being a duplicate content penalty in WebMasterWorld, and the only place I've heard of this is in the ihelpyou forum.

I wrote to Tim at Yahoo and received a brief reply from him and a more extended reply from his PR manager: "just wanted to be clear that in the situations you presented, Yahoo! generally does not penalize sites for 301 redirects." Which is not to say that it handles the redirects properly, but that sites that use 301s won't be penalized for duplicate content.

After receiving Yahoo's reply I went back to check on the forum thread where JohnC posted to see if he had presented a different situation, thinking perhaps his Site Match rep had reacted to what they considered to be a potentially misleading redirect.

Here's what JohnC claims to have happened: "My situation is that the one URL that I submitted to SiteMatch was getting minimal traffic, then one day it spiked to close to 200 clicks in a day. Well, the SiteMatch rules state that you have to have a minimum balance of 3 days worth of click-funds in your account or your URLs are inactivated. Mine were inactivated since I left my account at the default settings and it did not replenish my funds quick enough."

"So, by the time I had that problem straightened out, Yahoo had picked up an older URL that we have 301'd to the correct URL. They were showing this URL in the SERPS and would not show my real URL.... hence the phone calls and so on and so on."

It doesn't seem that JohnC's trying to use 301s to dupe anyone, which leaves me confused regarding the Site Match rep's reason for stating that Yahoo treats 301s as duplicate content.

The contradiction between Yahoo's and Site Match's statements regarding 301s concerns me, so I'm including JohnC's suggestion to webmasters in a similar situation: "run your 301’s for as short a period of time as you can to get your movement over at Google and then drop the pages to a 404. All the while hoping Yahoo doesn’t decide your 301’s are dup content and hit you for it."

If Yahoo is truly penalizing 301s then, as Barry puts it, this "leaves the Webmaster in a tight position. If they stick with the 301 redirect, Yahoo will treat it as duplicate content. If they switch to the doorway page all the other engines will treat it as a doorway page."

I am currently awaiting further updates/clarifications from Yahoo.

[bhartzer]

Thanks for clarifying the situation and keeping us up to date. It sounds like we just need to leave our 301s as they are and let Yahoo! update/fix their way they handle 301 Permanent Redirects.

[TechEvangelist]

Good work, Garrett. I'm looking forward to the update on this one. I'm currently working with a site that has four domain names pointed to a single site and has actively used all the domains to one degree or another. They therefore all appear in search results. It does look like some have been penalized. I'm using the 301 redirect to correct the problem and my largest concern is with Yahoo.

Craig

[Martin Smith]

Interesting to see this confirmed, the site in my sig has this problem in Yahoo, it was previously hosted on the domain that yahoo has cached. I have been working on getting as many links as possible updated before removing the 301, might just ride the storm out as bhartzer suggests.

[jmdb71]

Are there any updates on this situation. I followed yahoo guidelines and included the 301s, then my site was dropped from their searches. Ive since dropped my 301s (hoping google had picked them up), but still dont appear in any relevant searches. Its strange because my site home page wont even show up in the 'site:"my domain".com' search, but will ONLY on a search for "my domain".com

Are they going to fix this soon?

[melncali]

We just deployed 301s on our site and have experienced major decreased Yahoo rankings. Obviously nothing has been done yet. I have numerous calls in.

Very troubling that they still have 301 info on their site. This is very hard to explain the business owner that I recommended this strategy after a url re-write…

[jawn_tech]

Yes this issue is troubling. That's a point I've tried making elsewhere in these forums, that SE's seem to vary in what they accept in redirects and other issues.

Google takes 301 redirects to heart, while others do not. That's why I've spoken out before that SE's need to be a tad bit more clear as to which forms they accept or don't (and what it takes to employ them) -- or at very least, try to conform to a more universal method, as redirects can become a very frustrating thing that just one wrong move and *poof*, there goes your listings.

I know exactly where you're coming from with being put on the spot to explain. In my situation, I did not use a 301 and my company's site dropped from Google. Google is where our customers are. I emailed Google and when I received a reply, I simply attached that with my explanation to my supervisor that SE's are a complex, constantly changing algorithm that have become more tempermental toward redirects. Once the issue is resolved, we will see stronger placements in the long run. My words came true in the next reindexing.

Your situation may unfortunatly take longer, as Yahoo's spider should actually be called a slug, as it seems slow to get around (still listing titles we've changed since many months ago). But as long as when you explain it that you put the emphasis that this is an anomally and that it is truly a 'bug' on Yahoo's end (after all, 301's are considered standard), I trust they will see you are doing all you can as the expert. Hopefully your results haven't dropped in Google, and they may appreciate the fact that since you can't please both SE's with redirects, you did it the professional way and are still getting traffic from G.

Speaking of G, what happened to Garret? Still around somewhere?
_________________

"You are only coming through in waves. Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying." - Pink Floyd

[I am Nick]

I have been adviced on this forum to do a 301 redirect for my webpage www.plushtoys4you.com that all the suddenly dissapear from Google, moved from top 10 to 150. The summary of analysis is that I am being penalized for duplicated content as all http://www.plushtoys4you.com/ pages as well as all http://plushtoys4you.com/pages arelisted. The same pages needless to say.

So, if I do a 30 redirect to get back on good terms with Google, I might do the opposite with Yahoo?

Nick

[greeneagle]

The only Site I have 301 redirects on performs the best of all our Sites in Yahoo and the worst in GOOGLE, but we have also added a custom 401 error page.

Ken

[osnet]

We just deployed 301s on our site and have experienced major decreased Yahoo rankings. Obviously nothing has been done yet. I have numerous calls in.

Very troubling that they still have 301 info on their site. This is very hard to explain the business owner that I recommended this strategy after a url re-write…

I would recommend using a proxy redirect. This will work in the .htaccess file.

# -Rewrite Rules
RewriteEngine On
##Set Default Page
RewriteRule ^/$ /page.php?p=home [P,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ /page.php?p=$1 [P,L]

Can someone tell me why more SEOs don't seem to recommend this, it works alot better than 301s.

It allowed me to keep my PR5-6 on a site while I completely rebuily it.
Cheers!
-John