SiteMatch

what if a competitor submitted you

[textex]

What if a competitor submitted your site to sitematch and let the account go dry.

How would you know your account was dry and that your site was not penalized?

[bigjohnt]

I've been assured that this is not a problem. If it was indexed before Sitematch, and the account goes dry, it will stay in the index, just not re-crawled every 48 hours.

[Warren]

If a competitor signed you up and then let the account run dry, you would return to the status you had prior to being included in OSM.

i.e. If you were included prior to OSM, you would still be included post OSM. But if you weren't in the index, you would be removed.

However, your ranking _may_ not be the same, because new pages would've been added (or removed) and changes in the alorithm may of occured.

[soapystar]

what if your competitor was spamming and you put his site up for sitematch review........

isnt this how many ended up in the position of being penalised anyway?....by competitors paying for your inclusion in INK and then pulling the plug....?

[Warren]

It may of been a tactic in the past but I haven't heard of it happening with Site Match.

But I am looking at it this way, if the site is SPAM and not good for the index, then no matter HOW it gets the penalty, it deserves the penalty and doesn't belong in the index.

The "white hat" webmasters shouldn't be worried.

[blaze]

Yeah, I think that's a great way of taking out your competitor if he is spamming the search engines.

[sysdomatic]

It's not a problem.

I let one of my sites go dry in Sitematch and it didn't make a difference in the serps.

[soapystar]

except your idea of spam and Yahoo's idea of spam is often not the same.

[Warren]

Yahoo! have posted their editorial guidelines so we have a reasonable idea of what is SPAM and what isn't.

Whenever I speak to an editor at Yahoo!, I get the comment of "is this going to be useful in the index and provide value to the user enhancing their search experience?"

To me, this is what webmasters and search engines should be aiming for and whilst it is highly subjective, it does provide a good "mission statement".

Warren

[soapystar]

Yahoo have not listed their Spam guidelines. They have listed a catch-all and vague descriptions of what may or may not be approved which they have put up for their own benefits. 90% of sites would be removed from their index if this was really their guidelines. What actually takes you down in many many ways are not listed. For instance where does it say dont have fonts in a table that use the same colour as a background uses elsewhere in the site. Or where does it say dont have your site hosted on a host shared server that has a large number of what we call spam sites or we will drop you too as collateral damage? The list of what in reality takes you down is very long indeed and really has very little to do with those guidelines.