Yahoo Penalizing?

[pennyloafer]

Hi, I have a site that has been ranking incredibly in all search engines but Yahoo. When I type in the domain, it is in there with the correct description, but it won't come up for any terms at all. Yahoo has crawled it numerous times. It has been about 2 months since I have submitted the site, is this something new that yahoo is doing or is there something that I can do to make the site rank faster?

[incrediblehelp]

So many other factors could be in play here:

How long have you been online with this new website?

[incrediblehelp]

website address?

[pennyloafer]

It has been online for a few years prior to me taking it on, but I did redesign it and since that has happened, all of the old pages have filtered out of Yahoo and have been replaced with the new ones. I launched the "new" version of the site in early February. It is ranking so well in MSN and Google so I can't imagine it has something wrong with it. If I give the address here can it hurt the site?

Thanks for your help

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by pennyloafer

It has been online for a few years prior to me taking it on, but I did redesign it and since that has happened, all of the old pages have filtered out of Yahoo and have been replaced with the new ones. I launched the "new" version of the site in early February. It is ranking so well in MSN and Google so I can't imagine it has something wrong with it. If I give the address here can it hurt the site?

Thanks for your help

When you did the redesign I assume you did not do 301 redirects from ALL the old pages to ALL the new ones?

[nazcreative]

Hello,

There is a really good resource that explains what 301 redirects are and how to implment them here:

www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=163&page=110

_________________________________________________

Dan Naz
CEO
Naz Creative - Creative & Integrated Marketing

[bj]

One quirk yahoo has is that they don't spider sites that don't have a robots.txt. You don't need to put anything in it, just upload a dang file named robots.txt into your root. I bet if you don't currently have one, and you do as I say, that the next time the yahoo arachnids come along you'll end up being spidered.

Not that it matters. Yahoo is less than 1% of my traffic.

[nazcreative]

Actually BJ, you'll want to at least put this in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This allows the spider to crawl your site and directories freely. You may want to disallow certain directories though.

________________________________________________

Dan Naz
Integrated Marketing Services
Apparel Graphic Design
Puerto Rican Graphic Tees

[pennyloafer]

Hi Everyone,

I did not do 301 on this site. I did not realize that is something that would make a huge difference but am happy to learn!

I appreciate the help :)

[bj]

Actually BJ, you'll want to at least put this in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This allows the spider to crawl your site and directories freely. You may want to disallow certain directories though.

My point was that if you don't have ANY robots.txt file it is ***guaranteed*** that yahoo won't spider your inner pages. And personally my own robots.txt file is big enough to choke the proverbial horse.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by bj

My point was that if you don't have ANY robots.txt file it is ***guaranteed*** that yahoo won't spider your inner pages. And personally my own robots.txt file is big enough to choke the proverbial horse.

I agree, all websites should use a robots.txt file, even just to stop all the 404 errors from the missing robots.txt.

[nikmcg]

Interesting this Yahoo thing. I've got a site that's been around for 4 years. It does well in MSN, ok in Google but does nothing in Yahoo. Infact a search by URL reveals just the home page spidered.
I e-mailed them and they said we'll get all your pages one day, well they never did!
What's odd is other sites I've made do fine, just the one it doesn't like.

[sirius77]

We have noticed that instead of banning a site, Yahoo sometimes uses a "link-only" method to suppress access to a site. You can read about this at: http://www.searchenginehonesty.com/c...es.html#banned

Using this method Yahoo doesn't index the site's pages at all but they do index instances where some other site linked to a page. Therefore if you search for site:www.domainname.com you can find some pages but if you do a keyword search you can't find anything because your text is not in the index. You will also notice that none of the pages are cached.

I have never heard that Yahoo doesn't index sites without a robots.txt file. We have sites that are extensively indexed and cached at Yahoo without a robots.txt file.

[seoimage]

Originally Posted by bj

My point was that if you don't have ANY robots.txt file it is ***guaranteed*** that yahoo won't spider your inner pages. And personally my own robots.txt file is big enough to choke the proverbial horse.

Actually we have lots of sites without a robots.txt file doing just fine in Yahoo. Most laymen webmasters do not use a robots.txt file and if Yahoo were to not index these sites because they did not have a robots.txt, you can bet it would be missing a good portion of the web.

[jtracking]

I don't know - yahoo search is nuts. my sites rank sweetly on google and msn etc but with yahoo? wow almost impossible at times and I cannot figure out how? Yahoo indexed and ranked a site that was a total copy of mine #1. Strange.

[joesnow]

other point on here being that I wouldnt worry about it.

yahoo refferrals are on the decline anyway, cerinaly that what I've seen...

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by bj

One quirk yahoo has is that they don't spider sites that don't have a robots.txt. You don't need to put anything in it, just upload a dang file named robots.txt into your root. I bet if you don't currently have one, and you do as I say, that the next time the yahoo arachnids come along you'll end up being spidered.

Not that it matters. Yahoo is less than 1% of my traffic.

No robots.txt file, but most pages indexed by Yahoo.

Perhaps the behavior you describe is spider dependent.

[TechEvangelist]

I've never seen Yahoo ignore a site just because it doesn't have a robots.txt file, but I've never considered that as a possibility. Most of the sites I work on are missing that file before I see the site, but I always add one.

It's curious that Yahoo would require the robots.txt, being that they are the worst offender when it comes to disregarding the statements in the file.

[bj]

Look what I found . . .

www.keyrelevance.com/articles/bogons.htm

Gives you something else to chase down, I should think.

[Spectur]

Originally Posted by bj

Look what I found . . .

www.keyrelevance.com/articles/bogons.htm

Gives you something else to chase down, I should think.

This Bogon things could be a bugger to figure out and fix. especially if it involves more than one ISP . you would think the ISP's would do a regular update based on listing with the IP reg authority.

[bj]

you would think the ISP's would do a regular update based on listing with the IP reg authority.

LOL! Yeah, you would, especially since there are tools that do it via scripting that are available to the sysadmins.

[seoimage]

Makes for a very interesting read. (Thanks for posting it bj).

One of the overlooked little issues that explains why changing hosting or IPs sometimes changes rankings.

[deepsand]

Bogons also serve to explain why e-mail flows are sometimes interrupted when your account is migrated to a new IP block.

Once again, The Answer is "42!"