Yahoo issuing judgements for links

[mtgman]

I guess by now those have seen my trouble with Yahoo. After reviewing many other forums and emails to Yahoo Search, it seems that there are many others with the same problem.

Apparently Yahoo is not "banning" but issuing "judgements" for sites that have reciprocal link pages. Also, they are issuing judgements for sites that use affiliate programs and I would imagine this is inclusive of coop ads. I am not sure if G/Ads count.

Over the last several weeks I have been bouncing in and out of the Yahoo. Each email I send puts me in the Yahoo index and a few days later I am out with the reasoning as I stated above.

Any perspective from fellow forum members would help as I feel this will potentially affect everyone here as more and more webmasters find out about the judgements and report competing sites for attaining number 1 positions through link campaigns.

[MattL]

Ever since the April 7 overhaul, Yahoo! has been far more aggressive about link networks and I'm 99% sure they're doing it automatically since I have played with modifying the URLs only to have the updated link pages blacklisted in about a week.

I can, however, say that they are not banning directory-based URLs, so there are some workarounds: use /Links/ instead of links.html.

This is pretty easy to do if you have mod_rewrite (apache) or isapi_rewrite (IIS).

Good luck! Let me know how you fare.

-Matt

[webmaster]

I dont think that Yahoo is penalizing sites or "judging" them because of reciprocal links, in fact I have not had a single site faulter in yahoo and my real estate sites are almost 100% backed by link exchange of the reciprocal variety.

What they may be judging on is the quality of the links. Are they relevant? Are they respected in their own right? That sort of thing. When going through your directory, do you link to a lot of irrelevant sites?

[MattL]

We have a couple of hundred Realtor sites, which feature a links page that points to other Realtor sites (at random, and all within our network).

This worked perfectly for 6+ months and then, with the April 7 "new algorithm", over half of them dropped either partially or completely.

Then I discovered that those Links pages, specifically, were no longer appearing in the Yahoo! index; no matter what was searched.

Assuming something intentional on Yahoo!'s part was afoot, I renamed the pages. Lo and behold, 4 days later many of the sites "came back" to high positions. Then another 3-4 days passed (enough for a weekend re-index) and the pages once again disappeared.

After all of this, I noticed that other "self-linking" networks used a slightly different format and remained unaffected:
/Links/Realtors/

So I tried it, and now we're going on 3 weeks of "sticky" positioning. I assume that the Yahoo! algorithm is skittish about banning a whole directory structure, as opposed to a single page.

-Matt

[mtgman]

do you link to a lot of irrelevant sites

I am Linking to all revelant sites. A possible reason for your customers not being affected is their sites where never called into question in the first place. Unfortunaltey I initally enrolled in Yahoo site match and they manually review sites (at least at that time). I was banned for small text and since, have seemed to have a stigma attached and am bouncing in and out. Maybe they manually review certain sites based upon past history.

All I know is that this seems to be an ever increasing problem throughout the boards since the last update. Yahoo specifically said through email that link use of reciprocal link programs, affiliates and aggressive internal linking are reasons for the judgement.

I will say that as I send review request to Yahoo, my site appears back in the index within a few days. I do not think a formal "update" has occured since the last. I do not understand this part, but maybe I am not being patient for the update but do not understand as well the bouncing of my site in and out.

[MattL]

I do not think a formal "update" has occured since the last. I do not understand this part, but maybe I am not being patient for the update but do not understand as well the bouncing of my site in and out.

If you mean an "update" in the sense of "a new algorithm", then I would agree with you, nothing major has changed since April 7. However, Yahoo! does re-index on a staggered schedule; anywhere from 4 to 14 days, based on the trends I've seen in my sites' positions for given keywords.

Somewhat relevant to this forum, I've also noticed that Yahoo! re-indexes certain terms more often than others. "real estate", for example, is re-ordered very frequently, whereas "realtor" is maybe once a month.

-Matt

[kensmith]

All I know is that this seems to be an ever increasing problem throughout the boards since the last update. Yahoo specifically said through email that link use of reciprocal link programs, affiliates and aggressive internal linking are reasons for the judgement.

This is something that I believe you will run into more and more with the SE's. It is very easy for them to spot a page made by Linkmanger or other link software. There are a lot of these pages that are nothing but FFA's and that gives all of them a bad name. If you use a program like this don't be surprised if you run into problems. Time will tell, but why chance it.

[flip22]

I hope that that they would also take into account the percentage of outbound to inbound links. If somebody is using recip software and they have a very low percentage of outbound links, they should take this into account. I use recip software and all my recip link pages are still cached. I have a very high percentage of IBL's.

[ResaleBroker]

Flip22, I sincerely doubt that the SE's are going to penalize a site or page just because it uses software to manage it's links.