Yahoo and Site Judgements

[mtgman]

Looks like I am still having trouble with Yahoo. I submit through the site review form, they email me back saying alls ok, a few days its in the results another few days gone again. I submit through the review form again and the same process. They tell me my site has a judgement (not a BAN) and its gone again. <no changes were made to the site>

I am really getting tired of the BS. What are some things that others are doing with this same problem. Can I use one of my other URL;s put some content on it and link to the site in question? Is that against the rules? Will it not work?

Someone care to look and see what they perceive the problem to be?
www.virginiamortgagelender.com

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Paz]

Hi,

I've been looking for you, lots of people reporting problems, no solutions...

I trawled a few threads and found a message from someone who wrote:

I just got a reply from Y..
They are saying that my site has been banned because I have traded links with other webmasters. And because I have affiliate links on my site.

... but I would take it with a pinch of salt.

Here are the threads:

http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic23240.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum35/1845.htm

I'm considering the following, and would be grateful for comments....

1) Banning Yahoo from an old site (at an IP level if necessary).
2) Building a new squeaky clean site, whiter than white.... banning Google and msn from it... and waiting a year for it to grow with a very conservative link campaign.

3) Running the two sites in parallel, but with different content, different servers, different whois info, even generating the pages with different software...

Maybe, in time the Yahoo traffic would come to the new site, but without the loss of the work in optimising the old one.

It's a lot of work, maybe a long term view might be the best.

Cheers,
Paz.

[mtgman]

Hey Paz thanks for the reply.

I recieved that same email referring to judgements for link campaigns, affiliates and excessive internal linking. Wonder if that means G/ads as well? Did you see anything "wrong" with my virginiamortgagelender.com site?

Referring to creating a new site. I did, www.home-loans-va.com and had a link off my virginiamortgagelender.com homepage to it and then vanish! home-loans-va.com disapeared. Registered it by proxy and hosts somewhere else. I guess they saw the picture of me. Who knows.

Do you really think that Yahoo is starting to issue judgements or penalize for link exchanges?

This is today's reply to my latest request from Yahoo:
Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

Thank you for taking the time to write us. Yahoo search has recently
updated its search index and you may have noticed some fluctuations in
the rankings of search results. Our goal is to have the most
comprehensive database of web pages to give users the most satisfying,
up to date, and relevant search experience. It is not uncommon for a
site's position in the ranking to fluctuate. Many factors influence
whether a particular website appears in Yahoo! Web Search results and
where it falls in the ranking at any time. These factors can include the
updates we make to our database, the testing of new product versions,
the discovery of additional sites, changes to the search algorithm, and
other factors.

For answers to other questions you may have regarding Yahoo! Search,
please see:

[Paz]

Hi,

I don't know much about Site Match, but from our discussions, it seems one thing is clear .... don't subscribe to Site Match unless your site is cleaner than clean, because it will be inspected manually and in detail.

> Did you see anything "wrong" with my virginiamortgagelender. com site?

haha "wrong" is not the word.... I can't say because I would need to look at the code in the state it was when the nice person from Yahoo looked at it....

but many of us have things in our site that are ubiquitous throughout the web, that aren't/can't be automatically penalized - but they wouldn't stand up to manual scrutiny - if you know what I mean. The other thing is that the Yahoo employee may not be an expert, and almost certainly doesn't know anything about the real estate industry.

I'm suprised the new website vanished... the link from the old (penalised) site would be a clue for Yahoo (hindsight is 20x20).... but I don't believe they have time to pursue all your links so aggressively... Do they?

Maybe there is something "untoward" about the sites that we have missed, maybe not untoward, but if your old site is flagged, all your links are inspected more aggressively by Y.

You've used different:
html (incl title and tags)
CSS
javascript funtions - I think??
directory structure (eg /home/articles/page-name.htm)
graphics and names, alt text etc

but there appears to be a pattern of outward linking in the two sites.

>...affiliates and excessive internal linking.

>Wonder if that means G/ads as well?

Y would have a lawsuit on them quicker than you can say "see you in court".

>Do you really think that Yahoo is starting to issue judgements or penalize for link exchanges?

Half their index would disappear overnight if they did... They couldn't do that automatically, not yet, (despite everything they say about reciprocal linking).

It's becoming clear to me now, the problem was that you subjected your site to a manual inspection, the delay of 3 months is evidence of that. I'm not saying that every Site Match application is viewed manually (I don't know), but it's possible they are checked out by bots, and some sites are flagged for special attention, for some reason.

I see a big problem for Yahoo.... I mean, would you recommend that someone sign up for Site Match now? Only your worst enemy maybe!

Anyway, it's MHO you're going to have to make some tough choices now.... esp. about the affilliate structure of your site.

Good luck,
Paz.