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It has been recently brought to my attention that this directory submits our pages (via a tracking redirect through their site) to the sitematch program, I belive they do this for each landing page we have provided them. They did this without providing me notice, and to my knowlege this was done some months back.
From what I understand about the sitematch program is that it might rank pages decently but the results it provides for those pages which are not submitted and the lack of results it provides for those advertisers who opt out of it make it (generally) undesirable. Additionally, I understand that it ignores pagerank (or rather the yahoo variation thereof) and instead uses on page content to place pages. As most pages on our site - particularly those submitted to the program - are geared towards google and avoiding overoptimization and rely most heavily on inbound anchortext and hearty links we are doing rather poorly on yahoo.
The redirected pages submitted via sitematch seem to be eclipsing our own pages (for instance our domain name returns redirect ppc variations and not the natural variations despite these being present in the index), perhaps due to an association with our site, perhaps due to duplicate content penalization, I am unsure of the underlying reasons. Additionally (perhaps circumstantially) in the time since the third party submitted the redirects our sites have largly lost what little placement they had.
I am curious as to how this mess would be most easily cleaned up - I have no desire to use sitematch for many of the reasons (rumors) echoed above and the fact that quite frankly I think our site will rank better without it. If I ask the directory to remove said listings will my site be penalized and if so how long will it take for use to be reflected as a non-marketing target and place according to our natural merits?
If you were to stop paying for Site Match through this business directory, the listing would revert back to the status they had previously prior to the use of Site Match.
If there are a series of "doorway" pages, I am surprised that they got through the submission process. I have seen a large number of doorway pages rejected because they do not add valuable content to the index. See the Yahoo! Editorial Guidelines. Redirects are also not allowed, so are you sure it is SiteMatch and not Inktomi Site Submit that you are a part of?
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