June 7th, 2009
Me Vs Yahoo!
About 1 year ago one of my sites - www.netcurtainsdirect.com - disappeared from the Yahoo! index. It had been number one on every major keyword - net curtains, cafe curtains, jardinaires, for over 4 years, then all of a sudden, nothing. What ensued was numerous emails, a few re-inclusion requests, a fair bit of money thrown at Overture and finally, a full site re-design.
With every email I sent I got the same reply to look at the there listing guidelines. The only count they could have even marginally had me on was keyword overuse. My main keyword, baring in mind it is in the company name, was used about 6-7 times on the front page. However, it was that, which got it up the top in Google!
But now, alas, its up there on both! I dropped all the tables for layout, used full use of my h1, h2′’s, relative positioning and all the rest and by jove it worked!
Bottom line being, there is no quick and easy way to get out of Yahoo’’s black list, I tried everything I could before re-designing, but now I am so much happier, the site is much better and much more suited to the ever growing size of the company. It was just the excuse I needed. If only I was thinking that during my months of disspair!