I recently started at a company, and when I arrived, I found out that (based on our logs) Yahoo has not spidered our site for nearly a year.

The company had hired a high profile SEO company about a year ago and proceeded to work with them for about six months. I'm not sure if the SEO firm was to blame or not.

Looking at our current site, I don't see any black hat techniques being used (you can check it out at www.websurveyor.com and see for yourself what you might think). However, I can't get ahold of anyone at Yahoo to confirm if I'm banned or why I might have been banned. However, what I do know is that when the Yahoo spider comes to my site, the log files show that it only views robots.txt and then leaves.

I've reviewed my robots.txt file, and there's nothing there that should scare away the Yahoo spider. I've even reviewed it with staff at Overture Site Match, because I want to participate in that program but it will do me no good if Yahoo won't spider me or if I've been banned. Overture (even though they are a Yahoo company) can't direct me to anyone at Yahoo to help either.

Anyone out there have some ideas on what I can do? I'm tired of being possibly punished for the bad actions of a bad firm!!!

The Diva

This is what shows up now at Yahoo! Search for the domain:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1-&p=site%3awebsurveyor.com

If they hired a *high profile SEO firm*, what keyword phrases were they supposed to have ended up ranking for?

Marica,

Thanks for your reply. We had a target list of over 500 words to choose from. They didn't do the basics of optimizaton, like rewriting our content to match for any of those words.

All of the pages you'll see on Yahoo are old ones. When I came on board, I immediately started rewriting pages for natural search optimization. I got ranked very quickly on Google and did well. I sumbitted the pages to Yahoo, however, and I still don't get spidered past the robots file. So NONE of the new pages (and I have a ton of them) have gotten indexed by Yahoo.

I did the original submissions in July, then I tried again in August and September.

So as an example of a handful of keywords I submitted, "automate training assessment" was a target keyword. The page www.websurveyor.com/employees/automate-training-assessment.asp is optimized for that keyword. I rank #1 on Google for that term, but have not been indexed by Yahoo for that term.

Hope that helps.

Diva

Online Survey Diva,

I saw this and wanted to provide a bit of guidance on how to get a site reviewed. The best place to start is to make sure your site meets the editorial guidelines. Even if you're sure it does it might be best to double check:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Once you've done that and made any corrections that might need to be made, you should request a site review by sending an email to:

ystfeedback@yahoo.com

Thanks,

Yahoo! Mike

Thank you for that bit of information Yahoo! Mike. Can one actually expect a response from someone at Yahoo! when sending inquiries to that address in the same way that Google responds to the help@google.com? Reason I ask is I have never been able to get any response from Yahoo! to date related to these types of issues. Hopefully Yahoo! is working to improve this?

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Once you've done that and made any corrections that might need to be made, you should request a site review by sending an email to:

ystfeedback@yahoo.com


Hello Mike,

If some sites has disappeared from Yahoo! index, after being in the first pages from years, could be useful writing to that address to ask the reason of exclusion and the way to be indexed again?

Many thanks.

If some sites has disappeared from Yahoo! index, after being in the first pages from years
asans, if those sites were in the Yahoo index for years, it would have been Google supplying the search prior to this year. Were you also on the first pages at MSN, and are your sites gone there also? When did the sites disappear?

Thanks Marcia,

I think you're right.

Yes the sites were in the first pages on Msn too and they disappeared from it too.

It happened about ten days ago.

What do you suggest?

Thanks again.

There were many reports of sites dissappearing from Yahoo immediatly following the switch from Google supplied results to using their own technology and slurp spider. As your has only recently gone it's dissappearing act can not realistically be attributed to the switch over and more recent changes to your site should be looked at instead. "Extreme" cross linking or linking to bad neighbourhoods maybe....

Hi jen, thanks for your answer.

The sites are 11 and they are interlinked each other only from the home-pages. I don't think this could be an "extreme" practice...i think it's normal.

About bad neighbourhoods, the sites have many links pages, but I'm usually quite selective with the sites I link. Even if many of them have been linked before I started to work here, so I can't be totally sure.

Yahoo!mike,

Thank you for posting that link and information... I too had the misfortune of having a site dissappear from Yahoo.... I took your advice and dropped that address an email... got a reply, and things have been resolved.

It's great to have such a responsive Engine to work with! ;-)

>>It happened about ten days ago.

asans if it was right around this month, as jen says it's not a Google_related issue. Go through the checklist Yahoo gives as guidelines first - but there's a possibility it can have something to do with hosting arrangements. There have been reports of sites being dropped because of other sites on the same IP.

my site was "banned" a while back I believe because they claim it was "dedicated to redirecting the user."

Instead of banner ads, on the bottom of each page I have text that says "To purchase widgets, click here". My site has tons of good content and I spend a ton of time on it. Just sent in a review request, we'll see what happens.