Chasing my tail!

[seoapprentice]

I've been around and around and around with Yahoo and cannot for the life of me figure out why we are banned. Our site has employeed no spammy, or tricky techniques to bloat our rankings, though we have had some accidental duplication problems due to lack of SEO knowlege. (302 vs 301 vs IIS virtual hosts).

Our site does very well in G and MSN, and we are and have been in the Yahoo "human" directory for many years. Yahoo search banned us last year about the time we switched from sub-directories to sub-domains. We didn't know much about duplicate content penalties or good/bad ways to redirect at the time so we didn't use 301 redirects from directory -> subdomain. We have corrected this several months ago, along with a handfull of other top level domains that we have pointing to the same site (we just had it pointing to the same directory in IIS until we learned about 301 redirects).

We have been told by Yahoo to use the re-submit and the re-review forms, which we have done but nothing ever happens. I don't expect them to give me the keys to the kingdom, simply a "you shouldn't do....". Afterall up until we dropped out of Yahoo we were designing the site "for the end user", now Yahoo is forcing us to design the site for Yahoo.

If anyone has any insight, or would care to give the site a once-over I can PM the url to you. I really appreciate it!

[seoapprentice]

Crickets chirp and a large tumbleweed rolls by..........

[Marcia]

There's really no way to know without a thorough check, but a rule in debugging programs when an error shows up is to check out the last thing that was done or the last change that was made.

If you got banned after the big switch (plus had multiple domains showing up with duplicates of the content) then it sounds like that's what did it. Also check that the site isn't now putting out URLs with the same content - I've seen that happen with IIS.

Another thing - have you bought any sitewide links, or engaged in any very aggressive linking practices (or linking "groups")?

[seoapprentice]

Marcia, thanks for your response.

The "big switch" was made last year (before my time) and this is the only change that was made that could have cuased the problem, unless it was an algo change that just happened to occur at around the same time which disfavored our site for some reason.

What we did wrong (that we know of):
1. When the switch was made there were no redirects from the directory to the sub-domain so both were essentially separate urls with duplicate content.
This was corrected several months ago with isapi_rewrite 301 redirects.

2. We also had a dozen or so domains that were redirecting to the main domain using IIS - these domains were bought to preserve our company name and slight variations of it.
This too was corrected several months ago with the 301 redirects.

3. We had www and non-www being redirected in DNS.
This was corrected with 301s.

We have never bought links or engaged in any aggresive link practices.

My main concern is that if we revert back to subdirectories there's a chance that Google will not like it and I'd rather keep Google happy. Besides, since all the issues that we are aware of (as listed above) have been corrected we should be back in business, right? Maybe it takes longer than 6 months of punishment to get back in, or perhaps it is a one way door - once banned always banned?

And just for the record (not that anything was implied by your response), the site in question is a very reputable site that has earned Forbes best of the web for 6 years running. The site wasn't developed for SEs, but we are now forced to jump through the SE hoops to avoid getting lost in the shuffle. I only mention this to emphisize that we aren't some affilate driven site trying to trick SEs into thinking we have a quality site.

I guess my main questions are:
1. What else could we have overlooked that would have resulted in a Yahoo-only ban? (a general list of Yahoo's non-published no-no's would help)
2. Once you are banned, is it possible to be re-included?

I appreciate all comments and suggestions.

[seoapprentice]

Well, seems that our cries were heard! This last week Yahoo did an update and now we are seeing 19 pages in the index! This is a huge jump for us since we only had 1 page indexed for a year now, which was only indexed because it was in the Yahoo Directory. I hope this is just the beginning and more will start showing up.

I can also for the first time do a "ultra-specific" search and find my page in the serp!