Q and A: Why Isn't Yahoo Indexing All My Pages?

Dear Kalena...

My site is 6 months old and I've just gotten out of the Google sandbox for certain terms. But I can't get anywhere with Yahoo. In March they indexed 45 of my (then) 75 pages. Now, only my homepage is indexed out of my 116 pages. I've written to them; they've been crawling my site but nothing has changed so far. What has happened? I'm much too dumb to use a lot of tricks (cloaking etc), my content is quite unique, no one could consider my site spammy and yet. . .

thanks
Jeanne

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jeanne

I've checked and you're right. Yahoo appears to only have your home page listed. Because you have actually had multiple pages listed in Yahoo and now they're gone, I'd have a hard think about what you have changed about your site since then. For example:

1) Have you changed your robots.txt file?
2) Have you changed your directory structure?
3) Have you changed your navigation or linking structure?
4) Have you ended a major PPC advertising campaign?
5) Have you recently participated in a link scheme?
6) Have you had your site optimized recently?
7) Have you changed hosts or IP addresses recently?

Any of these things may have triggered the issue but I'd need to know more detail. I can't see any immediate problem with your code or site, but I only had time for a quick glance. You've got over 100 other sites linking to you, according to Yahoo.

One thing I did notice is that your site is not included in the Yahoo! Directory. Some people swear that Yahoo Directory submission is well worth the USD299 as they claim it impacts the regular indexing of their site and sends them more traffic because many people search the directory categories.

You could also try Yahoo's other submission options ranging from their free Add URL to paid inclusion via XML feed. Also consider using their pay per click service if you want immediate traffic and are willing to pay for it.