LouMinatti - 6:27 pm on Jul 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

As I mentioned last month, our web site was banned by Yahoo. This, despite the fact that we have been listed there since 1996. We are also in the directory listing. We are a legitimate company, <snip>. We aren't spammers or professional web developers trying to hose people.

I have read Yahoo's content guidelines. I saw only two potential problems. One was "excessive keyword repetition". I approached this very carefully, because I didn't want to mess up our Google listing. I removed the instances where keyword repetition were used for that purpose (places like image tags), and we dropped a spot or two in Google. No big deal.

I used the webmasterworldfeedback e-mail address and they replied that our status has not changed. So it's not a keyword repetition issue.

There is only one other potential issue. We have registered a number of different domain names, and they all are hosted by the same company and all display the same thing. For instance, we have xyx.com, xyy.com, xyz.com, all hosted by the same company, all pointing to the same domain. (The owner did this in order to protect all possible variations of his company's name). Could this be it? If so, would adding a robots.txt file in there to prohibit Yahoo from visiting any of our sites besides xyz.com solve the problem? Hope this makes sense.

My solution (hopefully temporary) is I took one of our unused, unloved domain names and built a whole new site around our products and submitted it to Yahoo. New text, new pictures, no pointers to our other domains and an e-mail address just for this domain. Yahoo accepted it last week, and it is climbing up the ranks.

My beef is the games Yahoo plays. I have asked politely just what is it that violates their content rules, but they refuse to answer. Wouldn't it make more sense to explain what the problem it is? How many thousands of reputable companies are there that are wasting time and money trying to solve problems that Yahoo could solve just by TELLING US WHAT WE'RE DOING WRONG? I resent these cat-and-mouse games Yahoo plays. I have never seen a company do this. It's absurd! We're banned, while genuine spammers still appear on the first page of Yahoo's search results. We've all seen it.

I will not use Yahoo search anymore. They play too many games. I'll keep using Google, and I hope Microsoft comes out with something good soon.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:47 pm (utc) on July 18, 2004]
[edit reason] Please, lets leave the specific keywords out of it. [/edit]