Yahoo and Sitematch observations

Yahoo not playing fair?

[GeordieSEO]

Just posting some observations from a colleague...

He is responsible for promoting a successful UK toy site. He doesn't do any shady (black hat) tactics. He had done quite a lot of Inktomi, Fast and Altavista inclusions which ran out in April. It appeared that the site had been crawled by the freecrawler.

When the paid inclusions ran out the pages were still in the index, indicating they had been crawled, but the rankings had dropped dramatically.

In desperation he signed up a few URL's for Sitematch. Once they were approved the pages the rankings for those pages dramatically increased. To check if the manual approval process had lifted any penalty on the pages he changed the URL to another one on the site. The original URL used for sitematch has dropped in ranking since it has been removed from sitematch.

So sitematch doesn't help rankings?

[WebGuerrilla]

If your business model is built on getting paid per click, you aren't selling inclusion, you are selling traffic.

In order to sell traffic, you must put your listings where the potential traffic is. And that is near the top of the SERPS.

[bakedjake]

Geordie, how long did he wait (in desperation) from the time that the rankings dropped until he re-signed with SiteMatch?

[GeordieSEO]

My colleague had a long discussion with PositionTech (UK). They said there was no reason why the site should be banned.
He also gave some example spammy sites which were coming up in the top positions for his search criteria and they said shouldn't appear in the results.

PositionTech also said that Yahoo tweaked their algorithm about a week ago and my colleague should wait to see if the site was picked up properly.