Yahoo's Confusing Issue With Tropical Birds.com

Although TropicalBirds.com has been doing well on Google for some long tail keywords, and it continues to grow daily, only the home page shows up in Yahoo. When I inquired about the issue with Yahoo, I filled out a form asking if there’s an issue, and I received a canned response that may provide some information:

Q: What are some of the common reasons that a site may violate Yahoo!’s Content Policy Guidelines?
A: Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines (link above) outline what we are and are not looking for in pages that we index. Listed below are some of the more common reasons that a site may violate these guidelines:
– 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

Since I am not a technical person, I don’t know what half the stuff is, nor would I know how to do it. Can anyone have a look at TropicalBirds.com and let me know what they think might be the problem? I haven’t signed up for any linking programs, I don’t have hidden text, my metas and the site aren’t filled with extensive keywords (to my knowledge), and all of the content is 100% unique – created by a writer who researched the topics for me.
I would really appreciate it if someone could provide some feedback, as the canned answer doesn’t help me at all.
THANKS!!

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

14 COMMENTS

  1. Elliot,
    The log entries you are looking for will contain the text “search/slurp” near the end of the line. You can do a search with grep or many other search tools to filter out and list the log lines in your log files.
    Here’s an example:
    74.6.22.106 – – [26/Aug/2008:14:10:22 -0400] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” 200 4065 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”
    Now, look at what is after the GET to see what yahoo actually looked for. i.e. it could be “robots.txt” like in my example above, or it could be “/” (the root of your web site) or could be a page from your web site like “booby.html”
    You want run a search on your logs for the two weeks and see what yahoo looked at. You should see more than just log lines for “robots.txt” and “/”. If you do, all this means is that yahoo has chosen not to display your pages yet.
    As long as yahoo keeps coming back and spidering your site, they’ll show up eventually. It is pretty typical for yahoo and google to come and spider a few pages every day on your site.
    – Richard

  2. Check out Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftropicalbirds.com&bwm=i&bwmo=&bwmf=s). It looks like most of the links are from your blog, followed by other domain sites. If you want the search engines to associate your site with tropical birds, you may want to do some link building with other tropical bird sites.
    Once you get a few relevant inbound links, submit to a few of the top tier directories.
    Good luck

  3. Hi Elliot,
    Just had a brief look and here’s my 2 cents…
    I presume tropical birds is a fairly new site (under 6 months) in which case it could be trust issues. New sites tend to get sandboxed (particularly in google) for a period of a few months after first publishing. People often say there’s no such thing as the sandbox affect but I disagree. I launch new websites on my domains all the time and all tend to get held back for a few months while the search engines ascertain whether its a trustable site or not – this could be happening to yours.
    Also, although you have great content I imagine you put the whole site up in one go (all 40 pages or so). This can trigger trust issues with search bots as it’s how spam sites and scraper sites are launched – albeit with often far more pages than 40 or so but all the samei tmigh thave triggered something that a trickle feed of content does not.( I trickle my content on over the course of a few weeks to look more natural to the bots)
    I doubt you are being penalised and it’s simply a case of letting the site mature for a few months and gaining the trust of the search engines.
    My suggestion would be to not worry and do the following:
    1) check your content through copyscape.com to get the all clear on dupe content for your own peace of mind
    2)Sign up to google.com/webmasters (unless you have already) as this has been a great help on my sites assisting with teething problems after a site launch.
    3)Make a site map which is described in great detail here for the yahoo crawler
    http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/promote/sitemap/
    4) Similarly, submit a sitemap for google which can be done through the webmasters panel. There is a standard sitemap that works for both Yahoo and Google which is explained in their also. Site maps with all your pages on will ensure every last page is crawled – they rarely ignore it.
    5) Work on increasing inbound links but don’t be tempted to buy any as this is now frowned upon.
    6) Roll out another site while TropicalBirds matures and gets a few months history under its belt. In my experience this is all your problem should be as you have a nice content rich site..
    ps – these are my views only and i don’t profess to be an expert but what I have outlined above works for me. By the way I’m a domainer and a site developer so have these same problems myself occasionaly
    Good Luck

  4. Hi Elliot,
    The answer is actually quite simple.
    Yahoo typically will do a high-level index cache of your site until you have more sub-page links pointing to your site. I checked in Google, and it looks like your Google Cache date is from Aug 18th, which means that even Google isn’t indexing and crawling your site, Daily, yet.
    There’s a few things you can do to help:
    1. Submit an XML sitemap to Yahoo to the SiteExplorer: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
    2. Gain more inbound links to your internal pages.
    Hope that helps.
    Scott Fish

  5. First of all, never ask them. Everyone hates domainers, including them.
    http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/
    Running your site here, you have
    tropical bird – 41 – 5.70%
    tropical birds – 20 – 2.78%
    bird – 96 – 13.35%
    tropical – 47 – 6.54%
    birds – 34 – 4.73%
    Actually looks ok to me with this, thought using keywords that much on a page may trigger a “keyword spam” alert.
    Don’t think they did not see the Google Ads either.
    And looks a little “spammy”.
    YOu probably had some idiot kid working at Yahoo reading it, and he sent you a canned answer.
    Once you go into your site, the content is actually good. But you have no related sites linking to you:
    http://www.urltrends.com/
    Incoming Google Links: 2
    Incoming Yahoo Links: 17
    Incoming MSN Links: 0
    Incoming Alexa Links: 0
    When I have paid to get in the Yahoo Directory, they had me top #2. Dropped me like a rock after I no longer wanted to pay their extortion fee.
    Good luck!

  6. Thanks for all of your help everyone (both public and private). I have been working on a few things to improve the site, and I hope that will help. I do think content is king, and when Yahoo has a chance to fully review the content on the site, I believe the ranking will reflect the amount of time/effort. I am probably going to sign up for the directory soon.

  7. The short answer in my opinion is your paucity of links, both to the homepage and to your subpages. If you go to Yahoo Site Explorer and sort by “Inlinks” and then by “Except from this domain” to exclude your internal links you will see that your site only has a total of 20 backlinks. This is an extremely low number and when I look through the links over half of them are from your own sites (which may be hosted on the same Class C IP Address).
    Yahoo Site Explorer sorts links by strength so as you go about obtaining more links, check back to see what is working well and then rinse, wash and repeat. I find that submitting your site to 100 social bookmarking sites, submitting articles to Ezine, Buzzle, GoArticles and a few other high ranking sites helps generate a quick base of 70-150 backlinks. From there I do a few blog comments and link exchanges and then I consider private purchases for links.
    IMO Google has got the word out that link purchases are “evil”, but dig deep enough under the service and you’ll see many of the big names of the internet doing private link purchases as well as participating in TNX.net, Textlinkbrokers or other exchanges.
    The first 6 months of a sites life are a rocky road for sure and it will be a rollercoaster in the rankings, but keep building links and you will see your way out of the rough times.

  8. Elliot,
    Thanks for making this post so that those that are also trying their hand at getting new sites ranked, such as myself, can learn from the comments.
    I think we just have to try all the established SEO methods, and at some point we will reach a tipping point, the magic combination that will send the SERPs on a rapid ascent. Thus it is only partly scientific because we can’t know what that point is. The fact that it could take months means we have to work in the dark for some months until it all comes to light. (Disclaimer i am a nube, and that is just my impression from reading things, it will be a while before I really know!)
    I do think the site is pretty cute. It almost made me want to buy a parrot! I wonder what pet shops would pay you for lead generation!
    Cheers.

  9. Maybe the Yahoo spiders are having trouble with the way you have your site navigation links.
    You have your links written like this: href=”african-grey.html”
    This assumes that the spiders can figure out you mean tropicalbirds.com/african-grey.html – if they aren’t that smart, they won’t be able to find the page (and therefore can’t index it).
    Try using the fully qualified URL, or at the least href=”/african-grey.html” (which is a relative link) and see if the Yahoo indexing improves.

  10. Frank, african-grey.html is a relative URL and relies on the Yahoo spider being smart enough to implement relative URLs properly. Maybe the Yahoo spider isn’t doing this correctly and this leads to the home page being indexed by Yahoo but no other pages.
    Trying absolute links or a leading / is a quick way to test this out with no harm done. No overall advantage for other search engine behaviors, just a potential fix to this problem with Yahoo.

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