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I have two sites that were recently booted from Yahoo!. Yahoo! comes for the robots.txt and leaves.
These site are squeaky clean. The only possible reason for the penalty was that they are linked to each other.
Yahoo! editorial needs to relax. It seems as though they are inexperienced and are not clear as to what is spam and what is not.
I see tons of cookie cutter doorways and networks of linked sites doing well.
What's the deal?
What can I do?
First thing run your robots.txt through a validator to make sure you're not sending them away
However, once you figure out what's okay with crosslinking and optimizing, the traffic is great - highly qualified (they are buyers).
I have set up a network of sites where there is very little interlinkage between them. Group 1 links to Group 2. Group 1 links randomly to each other, utilizing internal pages. So basically, there is no reciprocal linkage. This is working very well for us.
One site sells widgets. The other site sells cogs. Obviously these are just examples but it absolutley makes sense for the user to have these sites linked together. In fact, I would not even consider unlinking them.
What's there to figure out about optimization for Yahoo!? Their manual reviews are highly biased. What is good for one site is not good for others.
These sites were listed in INK for years via fee submit.
I am seeing my competitors go down as well. We have a real balck hat in the industry. I would bet he is doing something or reporting us to Yahoo! for something.