Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Back on February 13th we reported here that a paid listing on Business.om had killed the Yahoo! results for a client of ours. We had the listing removed from Business.com and I spoke with them and asked that any feeds sent to Yahoo! not include our client.

One of the indicators of the issue was that the page was caching at 89k on Yahoo! and was actually redirecting through Business.com when clicked. A few days after the removal of the site from Business.com the cache size returned to normal.

Well, we are pleased to announce that as of last Friday (the 7th) the rankings are back.

So we can confirm that it's a pretty quick bounce-back if you've got a Business.com listing and watched your rankings on Yahoo! tank.

Hopefully this isn't you but if it is - you know what to do (and sorry to our friends over at Business.com but head's up - this is something you REALLY need to address and address it FAST).

Labels: business.com, yahoo

We have a client. Alright, we have more than one but there's one client specifically that I'll be writing about here - let's call him Bruce. Bruce decided one day to purchase a Featured Listing on Business.com. Now, by itself this isn't a bad idea. In fact, in many cases it might even be a good one - but not for poor Bruce.

We noticed that overnight Bruce's Yahoo! results tanked going from page one to ... well ... let's just say "not page one". We also noticed that the cache size of the page suddenly jumped to 89k. As an FYI, the page is NOT 89k and Google has it cached at a mere 16k. So we knew something was wrong but it took a few days before I decided to actually click on the Yahoo! result for the site.

The address bar flickered just a little too much and I tried again. Looking closely you could watch it go from the Yahoo! search address to the Yahoo! tracking URL to a business.com redirection address to the client's URL with ?trackcode=bizcom tacked onto the end. About the same time all this happened (the site dropped in the results for most but not all phrases) the client also noticed an increase in the cost of their ad spend. So Business.com was profiting off of actions that hurt my client's overall ROI and Yahoo! was a participant though I'd yet to figure out whether this was a genuine glitch or a revenue generation scheme that just didn't work out.

The best information I've found on this issue thus far is on SERoundtable.com in their post at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002604.html.

A call to business.com did seem to get some results (i.e. "they'll work on getting the site removed") but I'll keep you posted as to how that works out.

So take this as a warning. If you're enjoying solid Yahoo! results and the traffic they provide - avoid a business.com listing like the plague.

Labels: business.com, yahoo