Does anyone know how to get Yahoo to unpenalize me? Do they have an email
address to petition this banning?


"Carol W" <from_you@nomail.com> wrote in message
news:30ir21tt0avfjpt00kdormqst0uab7bua4@4ax.com...
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 07:35:29 -0700, "Mike" <add@mcnabs.com> wrote:
>
>>I agree with you that my site can use some more tweaking but it should be
>>ranked the way it is. I am not in the top 1000 for any keywords. I think
>>I
>>have been blacklisted in some way. I am listed in their directory but
>>they
>>refuse to update my title, description and category. I have been trying
>>for
>>years to get them to change them.
>
> Yahoo early on - after releasing their new search - got a rep for
> penalizing sites they felt were trying to spam or trick their spiders
> somehow. The few that have gotten their sites relisted in Yahoo -
> "few" in this context meaning the 'few' that posted about being
> relisted - shared that they first wrote to Yahoo search to get
> confirmation that they were penalized/banned then fixed the problem[s]
> ... then waited a while [around 9 months average of a wait]. In other
> words, if you are banned or penalized on Yahoo - you will have to
> clean up the site to BEFORE asking to be reincluded - and Yahoo has
> been said to inform a person if their site has been penalized [removed
> from index] but they won't drop any hints about why outside "refer to
> our guidelines thoughts".
>
> If you feel you are penalized then I would look at the subdirectory
> set-up on your site where you have subdirectories' folders named to
> share the same keywords that the one page, in that subdirectory, also
> has in its file name. Such as
> /keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html
>
> Reason I suggest that is that at one time Yahoo, in their guidelines,
> dropped a big hint about _not_ liking people doing that - in terms of
> 'going out of their way' or 'excessively' using that naming technique
> due to knowing SEs noted keywords in the file names. Your site makes
> heavy use of this naming process - almost every page has its own
> subdirectory folder.
>
> Yahoo's guidelines wording changes often - I think they are on their
> 3rd or 4th 'revision' of that page. Some thoughts once shared are
> dropped - but that doesn't mean those thoughts are dropped by Yahoo
> Search, just dropped from being shared on the Guidelines page. Big
> Bill recalls them once saying that they leaned to valid HTML pages and
> now that is not listed - they also used to list "well-designed" and
> "site layout" as criteria and those two thoughts are not shared now
> either but they have retained, I think, the thought about not
> designing the site or laying out the site contents 'for search
> engines' and that is a nice gray area thought.
>
> Carol