Editorial Judgements?

You have been banned for one of these 100 reasons!

[nerolabs]

So I wrote into [e-mail] last week like a lot of other people did and got an answer back from them a couple days ago.

The answer confirmed that my sites do have editorial judgments against them. It also said they are outside Yahoo's content policy guidelines at [help.yahoo.com...]

Great! We are banned, but how the heck to we fix what is wrong!

We are #1 for 23 google keyword terms related to our products, and are in the top 5 in google for 160 other terms. On all other search engines, we do equally well - highly ranked, heavily trafficked. In addition, we have a huge Overture budget, Adwords budget, and pay PositionTech for the Trusted Feed program. We also pay Yahoo! for their $299 directory listing.

With all this money going to Yahoo, this is the only answer I got back from them in regards to their new web search... I mean, it's nice to finally know that I really *was* banned due to editorial judgment, but pointing to a list of dozens of reasons doesn't help me get back into the index.

Our site is a good site... no extreme SEO on this site at all. We've played it very safe. And it's extremely popular. And Yahoo has "editorially declined it" without specifying EXACTLY what the problem is. I'd have to change the whole site a hundred times and hope that I got it right and guessed the Might Yahoo Mind, all the while jeapordizing our other SE listings.

Yahoo is DEFINITELY new to this Search Engine game. Let's hope they get a clue and realize that "Editorial Judgements" handed out to as many sites as they are handing them out to is a bunch of fooey without being able to remedy. Especially for established, large, quality sites like ours.

In the meantime, what do you guys recommend we do, other than sit tight and hope Yahoo figures all this out?

Note: Direct email quotes of any length are NOT permitted under Terms of Service item 9, so I paraphrased the quote that nerolabs included.

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 11:34 pm (utc) on May 12, 2004]

[blaze]

Apply to SiteMatch for the URL that you are concerned about. They should tell you what's going on, this in theory what SiteMatch is all about..

[pmac]

>They should tell you what's going on<

I wouldn't count on it. See message 34 [webmasterworld.com].

[PatrickDeese]

On the other hand, I've seen some sites that are banned in G ranking excellently in Y!

[cabos]

SiteMatch wont help.

They will approve the pages you submit. No reason will be provided as to why your site is penalized and your $50 per url will sit in Yahoo's bank account.

[yaelede]

and your $50 per url will sit in Yahoo's bank account.

plus your $50 PPC deposit..(sorry, $49.70..)
I was approved by SiteMatch more than one month ago, and since then I had only ONE clickthrough, which was done presumably by a SiteMatch employee, who checked if my site was really included. How do I know this?
The search phrase for this click was "www.mysite.com"...

[crobb305]

I am seeing numerous sites that were penalized by Ink reappearing in serps on Ink Portals (not Yahoo yet, but MSN, Alltheweb, PureSearch).

[yaelede]

Yes , that's right!
My site came back after two months on every Ink site, on Yahoo! too.

Great news for me.
Anyone else?

[helenp]

I donīt see anything,
not my site or others I know of is back.

Ink pure search is not working...been an hour now.

[yaelede]

three of my main competitors were also penalized, and they are still "missing"

so it doesn't seem a complete rollback at all

it seems that I came back by the free inclusion, because on SiteMatch control panel I don't see any clicks so far..

[twebdonny]

Don't see any changes on any Ink products whatsoever regarding our site. Wish we did.

[crobb305]

I see 5 sites that I know were penalized all back. Two of these were signed up as SiteMatch. The others were not. Interesting.

[Warren]

"it seems that I came back by the free inclusion, because on SiteMatch control panel I don't see any clicks so far.. "

Site Match should take preference over any free inclusion - so if you are getting clicks it should show up in your Account Admin area.

Please remember that Site Match is not a real time system. Clicks may take a few days to appear in your account admin system.

[soapystar]

for those who had urls approved in sitematch but couldnt lift the penalty, how were you spidered previous to this? Did you have no spidering at all or did you see your robots.txt spidered and nothing else?

[crobb305]

FYI, the changes I saw a few days ago have reverted back. Who knows what's going on with them. I have given up.

[Leosghost]

Sure glad I don't give a rats ass bout "Y" apparently they make "g" look concerned about customers satisfaction....
Makes you realise that search engines are like Hosts ..who cares if it's free it's the support and the downtime that counts ...
Sitematch always did look like the greatest escam of the last 5 years ...

[crobb305]

Well I know that I saw Ink penalties lifted on numerous sites 5 days ago. One of those sites was mine and I got traffic from Ink portals for the first time in a year. Why would they take the time to remove those penalties, let the sites appear in the serps for one day, then revert back? Doesn't make sense to me.

[outland88]

>One of those sites was mine and I got traffic from Ink portals for the first time in a year.

I had traffic from the Ink portals for about 2 days and then it dissappeared. It shocked me. I hadn't seen any in eight months with the penalty.

God forbid they should do the right thing. It's not in their nature. More likely an accident.

[ridgway]

this is getting beyond annoying. listed #5 in google of 2+ million. the site passed muster for $299 yahoo directory listings for the last two years, and the $100 +/- for site match + deposit. but somehow the site has continued with the death penalty from the powers that be at y. It's nowhere to be found except for the last listing of "www.xyz.com" (site was approved in two days for site match months ago). I can't even get an email response.

my eyes bled reading the guidelines over and over again, looking for a snippet of a clue of what golden rule i might be violating. But I'm not about to radically revamp a site with good google rankings when i am totally clueless what might be "wrong" in Yahoo's eyes.

based on mine and others experiences here, i'm developing the opinion that yahoo has the problem, not the legitimate webmaster.

[contentsiteguy]

Ridgway you are absolutely correct. Just look at this interesting thread [webmasterworld.com ] and welcome to the club.

[Silent_Bob]

nerolabs - at least you got a reply from yahoo. We spend a lot with them too and they didnt have the good grace to return our e-mail.

Ridgeway, you are certainly correct - this is yahoo's problem not that of us webmasters. Our site virtually dominates our whole industry in google, yet is not good enough in yahoo's book to even grace their listings.

[makemetop]

Interesting reading this thread and thinking about the almost identical sentiments (if you replaced the term Google by any other SE DB and Yahoo by Google) expressed by people whose sites had disappeared from Google 6 months ago.

I still have a sneaky feeling that more people dominate the SERPs in Yahoo, Teoma et. al and are nowhere in Google (believing that is Google's problem) than vice-versa. The vast majority though, probably do fine in both!

Nice to see that despite the premature announcements that Yahoo will lose all their searchers the moment that Google results were dropped - Yahoo results retain enough eyeballs for people to be really concerned when their results go AWOL!

Long live competition - may there be more of it :)

[ridgway]

makemetop:
no, i disagree. the big difference is that google never took $299 for a review and inclusion in their directory, and then never took $50 + per click deposit for ANOTHER quality review, approved you for both, and slammed you with a "nowhere to be found" penalty.

[makemetop]

>$299 for a review and inclusion in their directory..

What has that got to do with ranking in web pages? Are you in the directory? Approval for the directory means that a human reviewed your site for legitimate content and they couldn't give a nuts about cross-links, hidden text, spammy keywords or a zillion other things that could make a site fall foul of crawler algos. The directory review means that they looked at your site like a human - and judged it accordingly. Web page penalties mean that your site is looked at like a search engine to see if you are trying to blatantly over-influence the results. The $299 directory review is a red-herring in this argument, IMO.

>SiteMatch...

Now, that's different matter. I agree that you have cause for complaint and would take it up with the provider.

Doesn't get away from the substance of my post though - Yahoo Search is now a pretty important provider of results, MSN will come on with another engine soon and we'll start to see moans that people rule on Google and Yahoo but are nowhere on MSN - and that it is MSN's fault not theirs :)

[soapystar]

MSN will come on with another engine soon and we'll start to see moans that people rule on Google and Yahoo but are nowhere on MSN

Im not sure how you equate moans about ranking or lack of ranking with being banned from the index?

[makemetop]

I'm not really sure what you are referring to!

All I am saying is that it is refreshing to see the commencement of "Yahoo rules/sucks" threads rather than the "Google rules/sucks" that have dominated discussion for the past year or so and am looking forward to the lively entertainment of "MSN sucks/rules" shortly to come.

Although I have sympathy to anyone knocked out of any index, I was indulging in the luxury of making a philosophical observation concerning the emergence of greater SE competition rather than wishing to get caught up in a discussion of Yahoo's ranking system.

It is the week-end, after all :)

[soapystar]

right, you are saying we have seen it all before, im saying we havent. All other discussions have been about relative rankings, most discussions regards Yahoo are about whether they are allowing you in the index at all. Quite different.

[contentsiteguy]

Makemetop and others: Maybe you haven't realized but many people have been slammed for a duplication penalty which is only because of the faulty way Yahoo is handling redirects.

Your site can be as clean as a whistle and you will still have the penalty. If you sign up for Site Match you will be APPROVED by the editorial quality team because there is nothing wrong with your site but you will receive no clicks because there is a duplication penalty (not a manual or editorial penalty by any means).

The way Yahoo is actually processing links is faulty right now causing many sites to get a duplication penalty when other sites link to them.

[crobb305]

contentsiteguy,

Many people here have old Ink penalties, and others have the apparent duplication penalty which was discussed in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[markd]

Surely the big difference is that you don't pay for Google, you do for Yahoo.

So, if you don't get listed/ranked for free in Google you can ask the questions but there is no obligation to get a definitive reply.

You do pay to gain entry into Yahoo (talking about site match here), so you should be entitled to an explanation as to why your page or site is rejected - even if this is not in the letter of their submission guidelines - it's just good customer service practice.

If MSN come along with a programme which is equally ambigous they also deserve to be criticised.

Can I just clarify: is it 50 cents deposit per URL in site match? So it costs the review fee, the cost per click and 50 cents upfront per URL?

Can I also ask, how has everyone explained this to clients when their site/URL has been rejected without a pertinent explanation?