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There were none. Zero. I was shocked. We are a legitimate merchant with thousands of customers per week that are referred through Adwords, Google and also Yahoo's own Overture.
Our traffic took a pretty good nose dive, down 40% that first day (and has stayed that way through the interim).
With hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, we scrambled to find out what happened. It took three weeks just to find out there was a "editorial judgement" (I wonder who came up with that "management" term). I was able to pull some strings (or maybe I just got lucky) and found out that they were upset about some co-branded sites we had build that had duplicate content (branded under our partner's graphic design).
We immediately put up robots.txt on those properties to stop search engines from indexing them (they were never meant to be indexed). I was told that it was a step in the right direction, but not good enough. I'd have to wait three months for a re-review.
Three months of referrals 40% down from their prior level was a long time to wait so I checked out the SiteMatch review. We passed. However, we were still not included in the index due to an "editorial judgement".
At that point I kicked up screaming and fussing on these boards and others trying to get attention for the matters at hand. I got the attention of Tim and Mike who both promised to look into the situation. After giving them my details not a single response from either of them.
June finally arrived, three months after Yahoo told me to "wait" for my re-review. I'm not sure why I was waiting in the first place, but pretty excited when the three months of penalty was up.
All my contacts had dissappeared at Yahoo during this time and it took me another three weeks to find someone who knew someone that worked at Yahoo so we could get the re-review done.
I was then told (in August I finally got something from Yahoo) that my sites were TOO GOOD for their search engine. We run six widget sites. There is a content site all about widgets. There is a shopping cart site where you can buy widgets. There is another site about running a fundraiser by selling widgets. Another on how to sell widgets at home parties. Each of these sites is totally original with no duplicate content.
It seems Yahoo was just upset that our six all original sites were clogging their top results so they nuked ALL the sites! They finally admitted that it wasn't duplicate content at all!
Their recommendation? To build a site that was a portal site for all our six sites and promote that instead. I told them we already had a portal site if they bothered to check, could they please unban that one at least and include the rest?
Of course it takes me 3 - 4 weeks ever to get a response and I'm just getting the feeling they care very, very, very little about us.
To date I've gotten three gifts from Google (including an awesome beach towel and a winter scarf) as a show of thanks for using their services.
Yahoo on the other hand has done nothing but work against us. We spend a hundred thousand a year at Overture, are a part of their business directory, and are a PFI customer on all our other sites. And we get absolutely no support from them.
To date I've spent hundreds of hours trying to get back in their index. Our customers write us wondering why they can't find us at Yahoo. It's a VERY legitimate site (probably the best and largest of it's kind on the web) and we've spent millions building it.
How can Yahoo explain themselves for this mess?
We rarely get the full picture in these type of posts, with 6 related sites, who knows what else was going on?
DiscountWidgetShop.com - main store
WidgetHelp.com - widget making help and forums
NWWidgetMaking.com - widget making store
EasyWidgetFundraiser.com - widget fundraising ideas
ImagiWidget.com - home widget parties
WidgetPeople.com - corporate site
All of these have completely unique content and original designs, are not affiliate sites at all. We've invested hundreds of thousands into these sites, and Google indexes them well and customers flock to them.
Yahoo doesn't like them because they are so popular it would clog their index for "widgets".
We wrote back to them and told them that if they were intent on only one site of ours to be in their index then they should include only our main DiscountWidgetShop.com site.
I'm waiting. Again.
a: user still gets the relevant information
b: the automated algo is fair to everyone
c: sites than continually evolve..be it from bad to good or good to bad are lost from the index forever
d: they dont have to explain how there own zillion virtual domains remain untouched
Andrew
The issues are muddied due to your relationship with Overture of course, but I think my simple analogy still applies.
This goes back to the point of search engines being "opinions". This is why I have no problem with spam. If their "opinion" is that my spammy site is the most releavant, then so be it. I owe nothing to Yahoo and Yahoo owes nothing to me.
My best suggestion would be to get some domains just for Yahoo. Different registar, different hosts, everything seperate from your previous sites. See how that does.
Then, don't buy or search Yahoo ever again. Don't use their services, don't surf their site. The best way to beat these guys is by hurting them in the pocket books. They piss off enough people and it will start hurting.
