Yahoo Search Engine Penalty and Poor Service

I have several domain names that don't even appear on the first few pages of the Yahoo.com search engine results despite search for the name (minus the tld). I'm not going to divulge any of the domain names, but let's just say one of them is a fairly popular sports site that has plenty of incoming links. It definitely has a penalty imposed on it. On my sites there are no black-hat SEO, hidden text/links, or anything that I'm aware off that is anything close to violating Yahoo's webmaster guidelines.

In late April I sent in a re-review request via this page:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/search_rereview_feedback.html

I got an "Auto Confirmation - Your Yahoo! Search support request was received" email almost right away, saying "Your message was received, and you will hear back from us within the next 48 hours with an answer." But to this date still haven't received a response. I recently replied again to that computer generated response and still no reply.

I'm actually beginning to suspect that, for one particular domain name in which I have several subdomains, Yahoo penalized those sites under that domain name to prevent association with their new "Buzz" marketing campaign. I can't think of any other reason why they won't respond to me. Search Engine discrimination- that's pretty ugly. In fact, one of those sites used to be in the Yahoo Directory for years- it is now GONE. I am not about to pay Yahoo hundreds of dollar as a bribe to be included in their directory.

In contrast, I find the communications from Google to be excellent and very professional. The few times I've contacted them they've been very responsive and HELPFUL. The Google Webmaster Tools page is just impeccable with great information. I think Google definitely takes to heart its mantra of "doing good". They even post invaluable guidelines and videos (thank you Matt Cutts!) in helping your site rank better in the search results. Google has a great product in their search engine, and it's obvious that they believe that by working with webmasters to create better quality websites and content it creates a win-win situation for everyone.

One thing Matt Cutts mentioned in a video was that the Yahoo Directory is considered by Google as a "quality" directory. Despite the human editorial, it's possible that the same humans can be discriminating against certain sites and provide favoritism towards others. How can that be detected? It's very difficult, but I wouldn't be surprised that such bias exists. IMHO I think Google should disregard ranking passed on by web directories, period.

Sendmail and "SMTP; 550 REQUESTED ACTION NOT TAKEN: DNS FAILURE" Error Involving "apache at localhost.localdomain"

I run a web forum, and for some of the user registration/notification emails I was getting email bounced back sent from my server being bounced back, notably from AOL.com. The "Returned mail: see transcript for details" emails always have the info:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mailin-04.mx.aol.com.:
>>> >>> MAIL From:
<<<>
Received-From-MTA: DNS; localhost.localdomain

Final-Recipient: RFC822; ************@aol.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 REQUESTED ACTION NOT TAKEN: DNS FAILURE

I thought I had configured sendmail on my Linux server hosting the web forum correctly, but apparently after some research I needed to do more.

I needed to create a file called "genericstable" under "/etc/mail", and place the following line in it:

apache user@my_domain.com

You would substitute "user@my_domain.com" with the user you want to show as the sender from your web forum script to show up as.

Then edit "/etc/mail/sendmail.mc" and add the following lines (before the MAILER lines):

FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl
FEATURE(`genericstable')dnl
GENERICS_DOMAIN(`localhost.localdomain')dnl

Then do a:

m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

to compile the sendmail configuration file, restart sendmail (I do a /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart), and voila- there shouldn't be any more rejected mail from your server with the "550 DNS Failure apache@localhost.localdomain" sort. Hope this helps!