LouMinatti - 5:57 pm on May 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

d_stew, thanks, but Yahoo hasn't replied to my numerous queries. I just bit the bullet and signed up for Site Match. I will monitor this for the next few days and see what happens. If our site appears in the search results I'll let everyone know.

It's not that I necessarily resent having to pay for click-thrus. I recognize the cost of doing business, and we're not expecting tens of thousands of click-thrus anyway. Based on our prior Yahoo stats, we can expect a few hundred monthly click-thrus at most, so it's not a lot of money.

What I resent is the complete lack of communication from Yahoo about this problem, their extremely vague list of reasons why you can be banned (which appears to have been updated during the past week, BTW), and their practice of adding paid inclusions to the search results without telling the person doing the search. I won't use Yahoo search for that very reason. It would be like reading a newspaper without you knowing that the newspaper was paid to run many of the stories. It smacks of dishonesty and a "grab the bucks while you can before this is discovered by the general public" mentality.