Dropped off from Yahoo

[otb]

Hi,

We are having a problem with our dating directory site, www.free-dating-service.info, it used to be ranked in the top spot at Yahoo for the search terms 'free dating' and 'free dating service', however now it is only listed if you type in the entire domain name. It is still in Yahoo's directory though, tops for free dating service.

Also, if you do a saturation report at MarketLeap for our site, only one link shows up at all of Yahoo's affiliated search engines, so we are losing and have lost a great deal of traffic. Here's the link to the report: http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

Dropping off of Yahoo took place about three months ago, around that time we put into place a security application, we have since removed it (about a month ago) thinking that this may have been the cause of our problem, but nothing changed with Yahoo.

We are still tops for 'free dating' and 'free dating service' at Google, so we don't know what caused this drop from Yahoo.

The same problem occurred for another one of our sites, www.soccer-training-info.com, it was tops at Yahoo for 'soccer training', but no longer, although it's still number one at Google for the same term.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, and or could put us in contact with someone who might be able to help that would be enormously appreciated.

We have tried to contact Yahoo but only receive form type responses that don't give us an exact reason. We have tried Yahoo's Site Match for our dating directory site but were denied because of 'content guidelines'. Although we feel we offer a lot of useful dating tips and a number of relationship articles on our site, besides acting as a dating directory.

We don't take part in any deceptive SEO practices, we do exchange links with a number of sites, but mostly quality sites within the dating related area (it is a directory), so we disagree with their assessment of our site, but are willing to make some changes that will help us get back on Yahoo.

Although we think the problem may stem from a more technical aspect, perhaps due to the 'security application' we had in place. Also, our soccer training tips site dropped off of Yahoo, and that site doesn't have as many link exchanges associated with the site, so we think it could be more of a technical problem.

Thanks in advance,
John Webster

[Buddha]

I've had the same problem before. I have many top ranking Yahoo sites and had some of them just disappear overnight. It appears that your sites are penalized. You can tell by doing site:url.com. When you do this for the sites you mentioned, it only shows 1 page indexed.

I doubt it has anything to do with the security app. My guess would be that the problem is related to your reciprocal link partners. Did you do a lot of reciprocal link exchanges? What kind of link work were you doing leading up to the problem? Also, do you link out to many sites?

Other than that, the soccer site seems ok, but the dating site does have a lot of outgoing links from the homepage.

[otb]

Yes, we have done quite a few link exchanges for our dating directory site, but mainly just other dating related sites. How do we get back in Yahoo and correct this?

Also, the soccer site is penalized too, and this site doesn't have as many link exchange partners, so we don't know why that site was penalized. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your response.

[strategicrankings]

Hi John,

its seems that the "culprit" site is this one ; www.ourbasis.com/online-dating/www.free-dating-service.info , same title tag, same description as yours. Your site has been seen as a duplicate of this one and to prevent redundancy Yahoo! has kept this one. please let me know if i can help.

Cheers
Riley

[Buddha]

Riley,

How did you find and single out this "culprit" as the problem?

[strategicrankings]

by searching for a site showing similar on page parameters as yours. I mean metas, title tag and redirect to your site.

[JohnW]

>by searching for a site showing similar on page parameters as yours.
I mean metas, title tag and redirect to your site.


Curious.... how do you search for metas, title or redirects?