Search Engine Penalties at Yahoo & MSN
In the second of a two-part article, we look at search engine penalties applied by Yahoo and MSN, and how webmasters can avoid them, or get them removed once sites are in the penalty box.
In the second of a two-part article, we look at search engine penalties applied by Yahoo and MSN, and how webmasters can avoid them, or get them removed once sites are in the penalty box.
In the second of a two-part article, we look at search engine penalties applied by Yahoo and MSN, and how webmasters can avoid them, or get them removed once sites are in the penalty box.
Yahoo has many penalties, but their systems are much more enigmatic than Google’s. Some penalties are fair, while many people complain in the forums about receiving unfair penalties with Yahoo. I personally have witnessed both.
Yahoo has a very strict spam control department, thus they have many penalties that are applied automatically and many others that are manual.
The main difference between Yahoo and Google is that penalties in Google are automatically removed, while removing penalties in Yahoo is very difficult and can only be accomplished manually, by requesting that Yahoo remove the penalty via email.
In Yahoo’s guidelines pages for webmasters, the following is considered spam:
Other Yahoo penalties that I have encountered as an SEO:
How do you determine if Yahoo has penalized your site?
Yahoo’s penalties are implemented automatically but function differently from Google penalties. Instead of demoting sites, Yahoo removes all of the pages for that website from their database, leaving only the home page.
Yahoo lists the home page of every website they have crawled so that users can still find a specific website by name. However if they search for keywords relating to that website, it won’t be found.
To determine if this is the case, do a site search on yahoo.com for the domain in question (site:www.site.com) and, if only the home page appears, the site has a penalty.
Penalties in Yahoo tend to be permanent and can only be manually removed. Therefore, if your site is penalized, I recommend the following:
1. Based on the information given above from Yahoo’s guidelines, try to determine what caused the penalty
2. Fix the problem
3. Write to Yahoo at [email protected] and explain the steps you’ve taken to fix the problem
Recently, a few people have reported that they have written to Yahoo and gotten their site re-included very quickly.
Another method is to pay for Yahoo’s site match program and ask them specifically to review your site for penalties. The disadvantage of this is that, thereafter, you would have to pay for every click sent from Yahoo’s search engine.
If you’re having no luck getting your site listed into Yahoo and would prefer not to pay the site match fees, you could also consider creating another site specifically for Yahoo. You could use similar content as your other site. However, to avoid duplicate content problems with Google, I would suggest using robots.txt files to block Google from crawling the new site Yahoo from crawling the old one.
The disadvantage of this method is that you have to acquire links to two sites, thus splitting your efforts. The advantage is that you can get another site into Yahoo’s index without paying for site match or hoping they will some day list your site. Additionally, you can engage in optimization techniques specific to each engine.
MSN has the fewest penalties of any search engine. Currently, they are applying only basic spam checking filters and consequently, penalties are few and spam abundant.
MSN describes the following as undesirable:
The following items and techniques are not appropriate uses of the index:
To ensure that your site performs well and ranks consistently, consider the brick and mortar analogy. Treat your site like your store. Study what works, and build on it. Announce your site without engaging in “illegal” practices. As you’re working on your site, think “If Sergey Brin reviewed my site, would he approve of it?” This will help you to establish and maintain a successful site.
Marcela De Vivo is a search engine optimization consultant and the owner of SEOmind.com.