Yahoo Filtered

[clasione]

Hey everone.....

I'd like comment on a situation I am having with Yahoo algorithmic search.....

I caught a slap in the face from Yahoo after dominating their natural search results for quite some time....

My Site: www.longislandexchange.com -

This site was created back in 2002 and has been growing in popularity quickly offline and on....

Since 2002, the site which consists of about 1,000 hand created "static pages" has always performed very well in searches about Long Island New York. There is a community portion of the site and classifieds section that I recently moved onto the .com version.... Previously the entire community and classifieds sections which consist of about 100,000+ php generated pages were on the .net version which was on a serperate server.....

My Yahoo rankings have been terrible for the last few months.... I tryed all the normal techniques of re-inclusion and such with no luck.....

Becasue of the possibility of a cross-linking penalty, I have decided to move the entire database driven half of the site onto the .com version so I can prevent the posibility of a cross link filter....

I have setup a sitewide 301 redirect to direct the engines and all traffic to the new .com pages....

I'm not sure what to do with this problem....

After working on a site for years and monitering it's search engine performance, you can almost come to "feel" what is happening with each and every event on your site.

So now we are working towards my questions.... If a site is filtered or somehow set to not perform well, we are only left to figure out reasons why this may be happening and how we can go about reversing it....

So you build a site, and you know it's good.... the general public loves the site and many many people use it, yet you know your still filtered out of Yahoo search.... What do you do? How do you address the problem? Do you let it go on forever...

You may now be asking yourself how I know that the site is filtered? Well working very closely with a site for years, you begin to know each nook and cranny.... If I conduct a search for something extreamly relivent to my site from one of my inner pages, the pages will not appear, even though I can easily tell that my page is most relivant to the query.....

So examining further I'm left to wonder is this a conspiracy against me the site owner, or is their some other reason why Yahoo wouldn't want my pages in their search engine?

I have felt that I must elliminate possibilities.....
I really didn't want to move the .net half and the database. The site has been there like that for years and it was a legitamate crosslink, but I did. I fixed it....

What should I do next? I almost feel like the only way I could get this site back in Yahoo search is if I removed all of my Google ads and replaced them with Yahoo ads.... That's why it brings me back to the conspiracy theory.... Is this a conspiracy against me the site owner, or does it go far and beyond anything I'm doing? Is it a conspiracy agains high traffic sites that run Google ads.....

If a site performs a certain way in all major search engines, yet dramitically different in one all of the sudden, then the simple question is why? Why is this happening?

All are welcome to take a quick look and tell me what you think is happening..... It doesn't feel right to shrug it off and forget about it.... I even try to forget about it.... But something just isn't right here....

[neckbone]

clasi,
Don't feel like the lone stranger.

[Marcia]

clasione, it really is a very good site, and I did take a look through last time you posted, but don't recall the details. I did get the impression that they got you for links. They've been doing a *lot* of that in recent months, from what I've seen.

[clasione]

Thanks for taking a look..... Could be a links thing but who really knows....

When it comes down to it, it's just pretty pathetic.....

What are they going to do, filter the site out of the index because it had or has a links issue which noone will ever know for sure if it even does.....

Where is the sence in that.... It's not like the site has a bad intention... If this site was an escort service, or a gambling site, you know I really wouldn't have an issue, but the site is one of the last regional portals for this particular region which allows the public free access to an arsenal of resources which are in most cases a pay service elsewhere...

Filter the site, and I loose, Google looses, my advertisers loose, the people loose, the internet looses, everyone looses....

Everyone but Yahoo!

[Marcia]

If this site was an escort service, or a gambling site, you know I really wouldn't have an issue, but the site is one of the last regional portals for this particular region which allows the public free access to an arsenal of resources which are in most cases a pay service elsewhere...I can see the quality of the site, I'm familiar with the area. But while it's not an escort service or gambling site - very true - having links to sites that have links to such sites available is equivalent to linking to the wrong neighborhood for a site that truly is catering to family neighborhoods. It could be construed as using the "family" site as a promotional vehicle for other sites. Sure it's nit-picking, no question about it; but it isn't impossible, given what the folks at the engines look at every day.

I really don't remember what specifics I saw when I last looked, but I do remember thinking that one of the links shouldn't be there as it was because it could be misinterpreted for intention. There was also something about the inbound links using linkdomain: but sorry, I don't recall exactly what caught my attention.

[clasione]

Well, it's just a shame that they won't tell me what the problem is.... To sink the entire ship, and a big one to say the least, for what is probably something extreamly minor, is a damb shame...

If they would learn to communicate, then I would simply fix the problem.....

But to be completely honest with you, I'm sure Google ads played some role here.... I would bet my life that if my ads were Yahoo ads, this would never have happened...

It's been months since this site got hit..... many many requests have been made to Yahoo to assist me in fixing this.... It's a good site....

I can only hope that one day I will be in a better position where I can make a difference and my voice on this will be heard in great proportions...

[Marcia]

clasione, a couple of things I've seen other sites get hit for by Yahoo: rotating links combined with an abundance of paid, "fingerprinted" links and/or sitewide links.

Yahoo has had the reputation all along of depending on on-page factors way more than IBLs (and to varying extents on-site navigation), but it intuitively appears now that they're placing more focus on IBLs and also doing a bit of their version of a "clean-up" operation in that area.

I can't say for sure by means of "testing" but that's how it appears with just a few examples of big fluctuations and/or removals. It may be simply anecdotal evidence and not worth too much, but it's worth looking into further.

[neckbone]

clasione,

I feel for you bro.

Do you still hit on the other biggies? If so, then there must be some "specific" reason(s) why your site has the issue with Y.

I've seen your post about this elsewhere. If Y's your bread and butter, then you got nothing to lose, try cleaning up anything and everything that you think might possibly be the problem(s) and then submit/resubmit the domain on their submit page.