Search Engine Penalties at Yahoo & MSN

By Marcela De Vivo , August 4, 2005

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.

Part one of this article is Coping with Search Engine Penalties.

Yahoo's search engine penalties

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:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Lots of pages that were automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Other Yahoo penalties that I have encountered as an SEO:

• Acquiring too many inbound links too quickly
• Setting up sites especially to boost link popularity for other sites
• Multiple domains owned and promoted by one company
• Linking to other sites using a 302 redirect
• cgi scripted links that pointed from other sites to your site, fooling Yahoo's robot's into believing your site has duplicate content
• High anchor density due to scraper sites using similar anchor text, which is the title of the site found in the engines

MSN search engine penalties

MSN describes the following as undesirable:

The following items and techniques are not appropriate uses of the index:

• Use of these items and techniques may affect how your site is ranked within MSN Search and may result in the removal of your site from the MSN Search index.
• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page's keyword density. This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view
• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms

Conclusion

Marcela De Vivo is a search engine optimization consultant and the owner of SEOmind.com.

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