jdwaverly - 12:54 pm on Apr 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

This is what Yahoo_Mike says you must do to avoid getting your site banned by their automatic triggers:

"To reduce the chances that you will be categorized as an affiliate site, you should make sure that...

- You have a high ratio of original content to content that can be found on other sites

- You do not have an excessive number of links to other sites, and you shouldn't have links to sites that are unrelated to your own site (from a visitor's perspective).

What is the proper content ratio? What is considered to be an excessive number of links? There are no specific answers to those questions. You should use your best judgment, be objective and focus on making your site a valuable resource for your visitors. If you do that, you probably won't have any problems."

This tells me that their algorithm is:

(a)Counting outgoing Affiliate links and probably other links

(b)Comparing that count against some metric representing "original content" (maybe the number of pages which have no Affiliate or other outgoing links?)

(c)Banning sites which exceed some magic a/b ratio

Of course once you are banned, slurp will stop crawling your site, so even if you remove the "offending" links Yahoo will never detect the changes and will keep the penalty in place.

The only way to get back in is to actually have a "human Yahoo" review your site and judge it "worthy" to bypass the penalty algorithm.
Good Luck.

[edited by: jdwaverly at 1:46 pm (utc) on April 23, 2005]