AprilS - 6:35 am on Jul 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

jrokesmith - I'm curious if you were abot to find out for sure if your site was banned? In my case I "think" our site has some sort of ban from Yahoo as well, but Yahoo won't reply to my emails. A while back Yahoo_Mike offered to check for me, but that was a month ago and I haven't heard back from him.

Your post gave me an idea. How about creating a new site just for yahoo? You could do a couple things (that I can think of) to stop other search engines from indexing your "Yahoo Only" site:

1) A robot.txt file that informs Yahoo to index everything and tell all other engines to NOT index the site.
2) You could write a little php to detect if it's a Yahoo bot - if so, the php script can allow the page to be displayed - if it's any other bot or user, you could do a 301 redirect to your current site.

#2 is basically in place for search engines that don't follow the robot.txt directives.

I'm sure there are many other ideas out there on how to do this... but I think you may have something with creating a new site.

Regarding your comment:

Should I look at getting a Yahoo ban as just a cost of doing business?

At this point it doesn't seem like it could get worse with Yahoo. If you're currently not getting any traffic from them - then doing something is better than doing nothing.

In my case, I've never been listed in Yahoo after 3 years of trying. If I could get a SINGLE page to come up in Yahoo I would love it!

I think I am going to give this idea a try with a "Yahoo Only" site. I'll wait to see what others think first - as I've seen some great ideas come out on these boards! :-)