walkman - 6:30 pm on Apr 29, 2011 (gmt 0)

I remember the old Inktomi blacklist that carried over to Yahoo. Reviewers were banning "affiliate sites" from the search results. I was on that blacklist for 5 years. Review after review, they kept seeing the same affiliate link. In my traffic logs, I could see the reviewer go straight to a page with an affiliate link -- nevermind the 120 pages of unmonetized content. Unfortunately, the reviewers weren't looking at the content. They would find an affiliate link and hit the ban button, making the judgment in under 5 seconds before leaving. So, I think it's good to have an objective measure. At least we have hope of recovery since it is algorithmically determined.

I hope the person that came up with that idea lost every penny in the stock market. Stupid b@stards, to ban sites for life with almost zero chance of recovery just because a person didn't like it, at a certain point. They loved the $200 to list it in their checked-for-quality-directory though and they had just introduced Pay-For-Inclusion in SERPS too. It felt great when arrogant yahoo search died, I LOVED IT.

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