Yahoo gets points in my book by letting you talk to employees in feedback forum

No matter what your thoughts are on Yahoo's search engine, you have to admit that having the ability to speak directly with a Yahoo employee in the feedback forum is one up on Google.

We had been ranking really well with Yahoo until a few weeks ago so I posted in the forum. Come to find out the reason we dropped was because the Yahoo slurp crawler got confused and thought that our homepage was redirecting to a blank page.

The Yahoo employee said that it was a temporary glitch and all looked fine now and that we didn't have any penalties or anything so we should get back our serps soon.

Now had this happened in Google we would still be scratching our heads wondering what the heck happened and tempting us to make drastic changes to get our serps back when all along it had nothing to do with our site and no change was needed.

I fully understand the desire to keep some things in the dark related to algorithms, but things like I just mentioned here should be somehow communicated to the webmaster. It will make for a better search engine in the end, and will make our jobs a lot easier.

 

It would be great if Google would do the same. I have had sites disappear from the rankings for no apparent reason and no one can tell me what the problem is. It would be especially helpful to new webmasters who don't understand anything about SEO and may have used some 'black hat' methods.