I was handed two rejection notices this week by Yahoo!'s Seach Submit. The first was for my New Haven, CT cosmetic surgery client Dr. Goldstein. I had recently been given this account, and found that it had not been indexed by Yahoo! since June of 2006. I chose the $50 site submit from Yahoo! rather than the free submit simply so I could monitor what was happening with the site. It was accepted, initially then listed as "ineligible" a month later.
The second site, OceanCountyEye.com, was judged ineligible within a week of submission. My initial frustration led me to run reports checking for duplicate content. I found there simply wasn't enough on the site for it to be rendered ineligible. We were left scratching our heads, searching for a complex answer to what was a relatively simple issue. Below are some lessons learned.
Don't expect alot of feedback from Yahoo!
Yahoo! will not be very forthcoming with information as to why your site was turned down for inclusion into their index. Instead of spending your time and energy emailing the support department, running reports and pulling your hair out, dig into your site, get to the bottom of the problem, then ask to be included again. My lessons learned below.
Its the simple things
First, don't make this too difficult on yourself. Look for the obvious issues first. In my case, the following issues were what I believe to be the culprit.
- Bad links, or links to spammy sites - Case in point OceanCountyEye.com site had some items on their Links page that over time had gone bad. Two went to URL's that no longer existed (404 errors) and the third evidentely had its URL snagged up by a very spammy AdSense site.
- Design errors - Sometime between the time I first submitted the site, and when it became "ineligible" the disclaimer on the bottom of Dr. Goldstein's web site had changed color. It was now nearly the color of the background, and looked like hidden text.
So after a simple edit to remove some bad links for one client, and a quick change to a style sheet for the other, I am now confident that both of my clients will be indexed by Yahoo! Easy.
Resources
No comments:
Post a Comment