Kate
07-14-2006, 06:36 AM
I have a Yahoo mystery that I'd love some good sleuthing tips about:
It all starts like a fairy tale. Once upon a time, my company's Taiwan site was ranking relatively well in Yahoo Taiwan. We had optimized the text on the site's homepage and main category pages, and got some local links from associations and travel agencies in Taiwan we work with already. Over several weeks we'd seen our rankings improve progressively, until early February when we settled at the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 for many of our targeted keywords. The person who had been working on text optimization and links got busy with other projects, so we stopped working on SEO entirely in Taiwan. Our rankings stayed quite steady with small fluctuations over the following 3 months and we were getting good traffic and plenty of leads from Yahoo.
Suddenly, two months ago, I saw our rankings drop from one day to the next, and not just a dip but such a dramatic fall that we weren't even in the top 200 results. I investigated the site and found that through an IT error, the Taiwan site and domain had become associated with the Swedish site content. The Taiwanese site was in Swedish, and of course none of our keywords for Taiwan appeared on the Swedish site. Google and Yahoo had both crawled our new Swedo-taiwan site and moved us far down in relevancy.
Of course I had this problem fixed within the day, and the story has a happy ending for both Google and MSN. They have recrawled the site many times over and are again positioning the site as well as before the IT error. However, in Yahoo, despite repeated crawls of the Chinese content, our site still lingers on the 20th page and below.
I have looked at the clues, but nothing seems to indicate a problem:
- Yahoo has no fewer pages indexed on that site, in fact it finds more pages each time it visits.
- The pages it finds are all indexed in Chinese, as they should be
- The content of the pages themselves has not changed
- No other elements of the pages have changed, and the site IT configuration is also unchanged
- Other countries are doing OK in Yahoo with the same site structure and page design.
- There are no significant changes in links, either new additions or removals
- The Yahoo spider visits regularly
So Sherlock, what could it be?
It all starts like a fairy tale. Once upon a time, my company's Taiwan site was ranking relatively well in Yahoo Taiwan. We had optimized the text on the site's homepage and main category pages, and got some local links from associations and travel agencies in Taiwan we work with already. Over several weeks we'd seen our rankings improve progressively, until early February when we settled at the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 for many of our targeted keywords. The person who had been working on text optimization and links got busy with other projects, so we stopped working on SEO entirely in Taiwan. Our rankings stayed quite steady with small fluctuations over the following 3 months and we were getting good traffic and plenty of leads from Yahoo.
Suddenly, two months ago, I saw our rankings drop from one day to the next, and not just a dip but such a dramatic fall that we weren't even in the top 200 results. I investigated the site and found that through an IT error, the Taiwan site and domain had become associated with the Swedish site content. The Taiwanese site was in Swedish, and of course none of our keywords for Taiwan appeared on the Swedish site. Google and Yahoo had both crawled our new Swedo-taiwan site and moved us far down in relevancy.
Of course I had this problem fixed within the day, and the story has a happy ending for both Google and MSN. They have recrawled the site many times over and are again positioning the site as well as before the IT error. However, in Yahoo, despite repeated crawls of the Chinese content, our site still lingers on the 20th page and below.
I have looked at the clues, but nothing seems to indicate a problem:
- Yahoo has no fewer pages indexed on that site, in fact it finds more pages each time it visits.
- The pages it finds are all indexed in Chinese, as they should be
- The content of the pages themselves has not changed
- No other elements of the pages have changed, and the site IT configuration is also unchanged
- Other countries are doing OK in Yahoo with the same site structure and page design.
- There are no significant changes in links, either new additions or removals
- The Yahoo spider visits regularly
So Sherlock, what could it be?