"Search Quality Team" E-Mail from Yahoo!

Receiving inaccurate "ineligible search term correspondence"

[prairie]

We discontinued Yahoo's frequent re-crawl service about two years ago. A few weeks ago we received an e-mail from their Search Marketing Services notifying us that we'd been made ineligible for a particular search term.

They cite a number of possibilities as to why this can happen (trademark abuse, pharmacy/gambling term etc.) including simply "deemed inappropriate."

The term is perfectly clean, the site hasn't been monetized in years and we have indeed been excluded from SERPs that include it. Meanwhile pages of automated spam containing the term remain.

Does anyone have any experience of this, or theories as to what they could be playing at? I can only think that someone has filed a spurious complaint and an editor has acted in haste.

From my perspective, it seems unprofessional and short-sighted to manually fine-tune spam filled SERPs.