Back in Yahoo! or am I?

[seoapprentice]

Our site had been banned from Yahoo for over a year, I believe due to switching from http://www.domain.com/directory to http://directory.domain.com. After many, many reinclusion requests explaining our change and begging for forgiveness we are now being indexed again by Yahoo!. Our site:domain search has been slowly growing about 10-50 indexed pages per day and is now a little over 2000 pages (of ~300k). However we are still not ranking at all without using really long tailed searches or specifying our site name in the search.

Does anyone know if Y! has a "sandbox" like google? Could this be our problem, which only time can heal? It has been a couple months now since we started getting indexed again and we are still nowhere to be found for even our less competitive keywords. I know how to play the waiting game, but wonder if there are steps I can take to speed things up a little.

[Marcia]

After many, many reinclusion requests explaining our change and begging for forgiveness we are now being indexed again by Yahoo!. That is totally sad, a person having to apologize for making a legitimate change on their own site.

Did you 301 redirect /directory/ to the subdomain? And are the /directory/ pages still up there on the server?

And if so, does Yahoo still have the old pages in the old location in their index?

[seoapprentice]

I agree Marcia, very sad :(.
At first we just kindly asked for a re-inclusion, which went nowhere, then we asked for a re-review, which went to the same place (nowhere). After a dozen or so of these over the past 5 months we resorted to appologizing for our stupidity and begging for forgiveness. They must have a some degree of a god complex because that seemed to have worked as far as getting us back in the index.

When the /directory/ to subdomain changes were made we did not know about 301 redirects (nor did we ever dream this would hurt us). Now we find that this is probably why we were banned - due to being inaccurately charged for duplicate content. About 5 months ago we setup 301 redirects for all of these /directory/ to subdomains, then proceeded with our recursive cycle of re-inclusion request -> re-review request then finally...beg.

The /directory/ pages have long been gone (actually since we were banned). I hope that this is just a "sandbox" situation and time will heal.

[mphung]

This week one of the sites I monitor started showing up in natural search results. It looked previously to be banned from Yahoo. It's been a couple of months since I submitted a reinclusion request and even then I wasn't very aggressive about it, so I don't think that has anything to do with it.

Maybe they are in the process of re-reviewing various banned sites to see if they made mistakes :p

[webkidsan]

There is no sandbox in Yahoo ... you can get good ranking pretty fast for a new domain ... and Yahoo has been tryign to clean up their act and I have also started seeign sites that were no where on Yahoo otherwise ...