Do you know anyone at Yahoo?

dmain · #1 (**permalink**) 09-17-2004, 02:41 PM

Ever since my Small Business Directory site was crawled by Yahoo (Inktomi, Alta Vista, etc) back in February, when my hosting provider was sending garbled info for a few hours, I've been pretty much dropped by Yahoo et al.

Over 20,000 pages (and growing) are currently indexed with Google, but less then 600 with Yahoo, almost all of which are coming back as garbled rubbish.

Try a search on Yahoo for "www.smallbusinessbigworld.com" to see what I mean.

Does anyone here know anyone at Yahoo who can unplug my site in Yahoos engine?

Hum-mm, I did add Google AdSense to the site around the same time - but they don't drop other sites for that?

ronniethedodger · #2 (**permalink**) 09-17-2004, 09:11 PM

That is absoulutely FUBAR. I have not seen anything like that to date, nor heard of it.

One thing I see is that the cache version of these pages are unavailable. It pops up that message on all of your pages.

It could be your character encoding. This is the first time that I have seen encoding strictly for the Mac:

Code:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=macintosh">

It just may be, and I am only guessing, that Yahoo cannot read it correctly or it cannot display it correctly. Again, I am only taking a wild stab at this.

I did look at your pages with the text browser (Lynx) and they quite readable.

As for the pages not getting indexed (as much as Google does), welcome to the club. You are in the same boat as the rest of us.

dmain · #3 (**permalink**) 09-17-2004, 11:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

That is absoulutely FUBAR

I agree, Fubar it is

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

One thing I see is that the cache version of these pages are unavailable. It pops up that message on all of your pages.

Yes, that was my main concern

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

It could be your character encoding. This is the first time that I have seen encoding strictly for the Mac:

Code:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=macintosh">

It just may be, and I am only guessing, that Yahoo cannot read it correctly or it cannot display it correctly. Again, I am only taking a wild stab at this.

Thanks, I've updated the coding to reflect iso-859-1

Quote:

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

As for the pages not getting indexed (as much as Google does), welcome to the club. You are in the same boat as the rest of us.

I feel very welcome indeed - I feel Google far surpasses Yahoo in almost every respect.

ronniethedodger · #4 (**permalink**) 09-18-2004, 04:58 AM

You know, I just checked your other site http://www.mainwc.com/ and it is doing the same thing at Yahoo -- the garbage characters. It too has the Mac encoding.

Same error on the cache page also:

Code:

We're sorry, but we could not process your request for the cache of http://donald.mainwc.com/katahdin_photos.html. Please click here to check the current page.

The titles are not there and have the url instead.

This is all too strange. Somehow, Yahoo is getting screwed up with the encoding. That is obvious now. They are converting the plain text Html into something unintelligible.

You may want to ask them what is up. The only place I can see to do that is in the comment box here. Hopefully they will see and respond to it. They should be made aware that there is something snafu to correct the problem.

dmain · #5 (**permalink**) 09-27-2004, 05:52 PM

Ronnie,

The "charset=macintosh" does seem to have been the problem - thank you, thank you!

Checking on Yahoo (and partner sites) I now see that any pages that were crawled on or after Sept. 19 are coming back as "normal" pages. :-)

As a small gesture of my appreciation I would like to offer you a free listing in Small Business Big World. Just let me have your contact details (including your town/city location) and I will get a listing up for you right away.

Again, thank you very much!!!

This is good information to know for anyone else who may try to use this definition. I've sent a note to Yahoo, but again will not hold my breath that they will do anything about it.

ronniethedodger · #6 (**permalink**) 09-28-2004, 08:11 PM

No problem. Glad to hear it worked out for you. Will get back to you on the listing. Thanx.

sofy60 · #7 (**permalink**) 09-29-2004, 03:02 PM

make sure all your pages have meta tags yahoo is now looking for them

ronniethedodger · #8 (**permalink**) 09-29-2004, 10:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sofy60

make sure all your pages have meta tags yahoo is now looking for them

Why do you say that? And which ones in particular are they looking for? What will happen if they are not there?

dmain · #9 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008, 05:45 PM

5 years later and the site is still not returned in Yahoo! results!

If you search for "smallbusinessbigworld.com" it is found in some version of their index. But if you search for "Small Business Directory" there is no sign of the site. It has been consistently coming back on page one of Google for the same search phrase for years!

Anyone got any idea as to whether it's been banned or dropped from Yahoo! for some reason? Any suggestions as to how to get it back in search results for Yahoo?

kgun · #10 (**permalink**) 03-31-2008, 05:40 PM

No, but today I heard about a new Yahoo site: Shine: Fashion and Beauty, Healthy Living, Parenting, Sex and Love, Career and Money, Food, and more - Shine on Yahoo!

newsblaze · #11 (**permalink**) 05-16-2008, 05:58 PM

I have some questions for you.

Why are you using framesets?

Why do you have urchin tracker and a big chunk of javascript code at the top of your main page?

Why do you have entities rather than ascii characters in your title?

Do you have a way of displaying your pages without framesets?

Do you have a sitemap for yahoo to check?

It looks like you are making it too hard for Yahoo.

innominds · #12 (**permalink**) 05-25-2008, 01:16 PM

Try to make the things easy for yahoo spiders by having a clean html ... This may be the only reason for your problem.