What to do if Your Site is Blacklisted on Yahoo! Search

Monte: Right. Alright, well this is a good topic just to wrap this point up is that, if you do have a problem with Yahoo! and you think that your issue is legitimate and that you have legitimate content but you are somehow blacklisted and you are not getting the results you think you should….and this did actually happen to us. We bought Moniker.Com actually from a customer of ours several years ago and didn’t know, but it actually was blacklisted and didn’t know it for a little while. It turns out it was blacklisted or not in the Yahoo! index because it was actually used as a search page with no content on it.

Tim: Right.

Monte: So, we discovered it because, when we first did our first round of SEO analysis, we discovered this and I ran into…I forgot who it was at the SES show in San Jose…the gentleman really helped me out a lot and gave me the right contact to really get us looked at again and evaluated in Yahoo!. And although it wasn’t very, very quick, it did occur; and we got out of the blacklist and back into the search listings. What is the best way for people to resolve that with Yahoo!, and the quickest way, and how does one speed up that process, if at all?

Tim: Yea, so, we created a process and we have actually an internal SLA for people to actually get back to actually resolve these issues. So, what people can do is send an email to YSTFeedback@Yahoo!.com and you say, “This is my domain, I think I’m banned, this is why I think it happened, and this is what I’ve done to clean it up.” Then, what will happen is this will go to a team that will look through the site and make sure that the site is actually clean now. Then, we’ll reinclude it in the index.

Monte: Oh, that’s good. How many people look at that email; because it seems like that you would get a lot of that with all the people and all the web content on there. I mean, is there a ton of people that actually get that email to help go through that?

Tim: Yea, I mean it really depends. It depends on the site and we see with the site. A lot of people are in the gray…may be a little bit over the gray area…and they might have gotten panned and then they say, “Well, if I just do these two things, maybe they won’t…if I just clean up the on-page stuff, maybe they won’t find the off-page stuff.” So, they send it in. It’s just a pain. It’s easier for us if people…you know, you got caught, you clean it up, you let us know about it, and then we can include you back in the index.

Monte: And what’s the lag?

Tim: Generally, we fix…with all the requests, we try and take action on all the requests we get within a couple weeks, between 2 and 3 weeks. And Then it might take… depending on what you’re doing, it might take a little while to get that content back in the index. So, I think people just need to understand that they just need to be patient, and then we’ll get your site back into the index as quickly as possible, assuming the site is clean. Some people send us emails, they keep emailing, I get emails through Webmaster World, the stickies through all different sources saying, “I know my site is clean,” and I go and look at the site, and there’s just all sorts of bad links coming in the site, there’s queered stuffing, all sorts of directories on the site, and you have to scroll down for 5 screens to see all the content, and then, like, “this is clean,” “this is good content” and it obviously isn’t. It’s much better if someone actually tries to abide by the rules and get a friend to look at your site and say, “Do you think this is okay?” just as a sanity check. A lot of times I get emails where it is fairly blatant stuff.

Monte: Right, right. Well, that’s really good to know because people face this every day and there’s legitimate people out there that think they have good content and probably don’t know some of the things that you shared with us today. So, we really appreciate that. Sorry if I pinned you down a little bit, but…..

Tim: (laughing) Well thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Monte: Yea, it’s good because, you know, it’s not every day you get somebody in your position to share some of the things that not a lot of people know and just the few links that we put on the chat room…and I would ask that you stay on in the chat room and post some more of those helpful tools in those areas because it’s going to get people to sign up for your products and services and I think that a lot of people will get a lot out of it.

Tim: Yea, I just want to answer one question. People were saying bad sites coming into the site can screw you over. If it’s coming from other people, I don’t think that’s something that’s fair, but oftentimes these bad links are coming into the site from other sites, that site most often coming into that site from other sites that that particular site owner owns. So, that’s to clarify the question people had on the forms.

Monte: And I know we didn’t get to cover the issue of fraud, but maybe on another show; because it is a big, important issue. It is something that I know you guys are concentrating heavily on and it’s good that we all prevent that because all it does is affect everybody’s outcomes and their bottom lines and I know that you guys want to have a nice product and service in offering going forward. So, again I really appreciate your time today. We’re going to break for a commercial, we’re going to have Stefanie Leffler on from Monster Commerce, we’re going to talk about some ecommerce solutions that will really help you drive more revenue to your site too. Thanks a lot Tim.

Tim: Thanks, Monte. Bye.

Monte: Okay, take care.