Reasons for a Yahoo Penalty & generic email
Yahoo....situation continues......Reasons for a Yahoo Penalty:Yahoo is currently sending a generic email to those that inquire about a penalty that outlines the following possible reasons:
- Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site)
- Massive domain interlinking
- Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content
- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka “link farms”)
- Hidden text
- Excessive keyword repetition
...These reasons are generic at best. What I'm curious to determine is where the lines are and what sort of techniques could trip each of these. of these, the following seem most ambiguous and potentially far-reaching:
1. Massive Domain Interlinking - what does this mean exaclty? What is you use various subdomains for different sections of your site? Does this trigger a penalty? Too many links between each of your pages? And, how many is too many?
2. Affiliate programs without substantial unique content - What exactly is substantial? If a car site uses the descriptions of cars from its affiliate program, as part of the catalog, but the site offers their own significant car guide section - is this substantial enough? Or is there some ratio in play here?
3. Reciprical Link "programs" - this is perhaps the trickiest of them all. Google has long-since banned link farms, but could Yahoo be looking beyond simply link farms to see if a site has too many reciprical links? In a recent quick search of a popular key phrase, I found a suprisingly small number of listings with links pages.
Are certain categories being hit harder than others? Many have pointed out travel, but I've seen other examples as well.
Are the hardest hit categories those that Yahoo eCommerce is competing directly with?
Reasons for a Yahoo Penalty:
"My site is gone from the Yahoo serps for all of my normal search terms.
I think I've received a duplicate penalty because of my Affiliates. I have a Yahoo Store, and each affiliate gets a link like this:
store.yahoo.com/mystore/affiliateID#
Since Yahoo dropped google and started it's own search, these affiliate links have been showing up in the Yahoo serps. Sometimes even higher than my own page. They point to my homepage and would appear to be mirror sites. I've been worried for a while now that the new Yahoo algo was going to see them as duplicate content.
It's amazing that Yahoo SEARCH has done this with their own Yahoo STORES. Yahoo Store's affiliate program creates these URL's automatically to send to our affiliates. Yahoo encourages the store owners to get affiliates, but when we do, they penalize us for duplicate content.
Of course, this is just my guess on why I was dropped from Yahoo, and maybe I'll get lucky and be back in tomorrow. But regardless, Yahoo shouldn't have all those duplicates of my site in their index. Google seems to sort them out just fine. Why can't Yahoo?
I was having the same problem with Inktomi, but even they seem to be sorting them out better than Yahoo."
"There are different reasons some sites and pages have not been appearing in the serps. Sometimes the reason is penalties of one sort or another. A completely unrelated phenomenon of a technical nature has been effecting another group of pages -- usually "pages" and not "sites". Penalties normally apply to whole domains. The technical problem was usually/mostly something that effected individual pages. I certainly don't know ALL the reasons the glitch effected a page, but one is when another page linked to a target page via some sorts of redirects, the target page would disappear from the serps while the "linking to" redirect URL would appear...Notice how this will only affect one page on the target domain. Usually this would be the main page of the target domain, and interior pages would continue to rank more or less normally. Some whole domains might be effected by the glitch though if they had some all-encompassing redirect or duplicate issue that caused them to be mistakenly lost. "
posted by Jen @ 7:22 AM
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