Gaining more Yahoo and MSN traffic

[d33man]

Hi

I've been running my AM site since the start of the year and saw some great results in organic search listings, especially from the start of March when my natural traffic pattern settled, I had lots of good content and teh site in general had settled down.

Since then traffic grew each week at healthy levels and obviously I was quite chuffed...then my site disappeared from Google! Completely missing in the SERPs. Long and short is that it looks like my site has been blacklisted as I've been caught up in some spamming that someone else has done which has taken content from my site so I assume G has blacklisted me for thinking my site is part of this spam

Anyway that aside, I had all my eggs in the Google basket and relied on G for 90% of all traffic! :scared

Now that has disappeared I'm left with trickles from Yahoo and some from MSN.

My question: Whilst I understand search volumes are most likely simply lower in the other 2 engines, are there any key differences in gaining rankings in Yahoo and MSN in comparison to Google?

Basically whilst I'm awaiting Google's response on reinstating my website, I'll need to rely on Yahoo and MSN for my organic traffic so whilst the numbers are far lower I want to know what I can do about it.

The only key difference I 'think' my site may be suffering from is that it is .com instead of .co.uk - I wonder if Yahoo and MSN simply drive less traffic because of that?

It is a UK travel website and the search terms were all varied, long-tail terms which Google happily plugged for me and I was earning decent commission from. Obviously since the traffic has dried up this week so has the commission.

I've submitted sitemaps to both engines, they regularily index my site (log file analysis) however where I ranked really well in Google on certain search terms, I'm not ranking anywhere near as good in the other 2

thanks, D

[Top banana]

Google has about 90% to 95% market share, so without it you will be stuffed.

Google will not blacklist you becuase someone copied your content, so you need to look at your site and links, then read google's guidelines and see what you have done wrong. Make the changes, then file a reconsideration request with google.

[confuscius]

The loss of traffic in this case is because the spammers have usurped d33man's pages by spamming multiple cross linked copies into Google. The pages will still be included so reinclusion will not work as it is not necessary. The only way, to my knowledge, that this will be dealt with is when Google deals with this latest batch of wildcard subdomain spamming technique.

[d33man]

The loss of traffic in this case is because the spammers have usurped d33man's pages by spamming multiple cross linked copies into Google. The pages will still be included so reinclusion will not work as it is not necessary. The only way, to my knowledge, that this will be dealt with is when Google deals with this latest batch of wildcard subdomain spamming technique.

Yes confuscius is entirely correct...

Regarding the ranking problem, here's what I've found. As my domain is .com it loses weighting from UK searches in all search engines except Goolgle as Google also uses IP address (hence locale) to determine search.

Therefore the resolution to gain more traffic from the likes of Yahoo UK search (as my website is a UK product website) is to change my .com to .co.uk

However I'm quite concerned at how easy this will be? I know I can set up a 301 from .com to .co.uk and 'hope' any rankings get migrated over but does anyone have any experience on this? Right now I'm barely getting traffic anyway due to the Google thing so might be the best time to do it? I get (small volume) traffic from Yahoo.com and live.com but I think i'd get more from teh .co.uk versions. Didn't realise the impact of the .co.uk domain names issue!

Anyone with thoughts?

thanks, D