Dropped from Yahoo
Well now that I’ve had time to start organizing everything, I should probably explain what prompted me to change from a generally static site to a blog. First of all, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. They say over 40,000 people start a blog every day. I know I’m already WAY behind in the game. In fact I’m so far behind that I figured what’s the point of adding one more blog to the world? It’s not like anyone is going to read it!
I’ve been working on several SEO projects lately to help drive web traffic to my 40+ websites and reduce the massive fortune that I spend on PPC advertising like Google Adwords. Throughout my research I kept coming across people who are using blogs as the backbone of their business. This didn’t really worry me–after all I’ve been able to make a nice living off of the web without following a lot of the guru’s rules. Nevertheless, the power of blogs and the sheer size of the blogging community continued to make me wonder what I’d been missing.
Three days ago was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My biggest site (www.prayway.com) in terms of total pages was suddenly dropped from Yahoo. I’m guessing they think I was content spamming due to the fact that I’ve added several thousand pages in the last month. The part that hurts most about it is that this was one of the few sites that I actually spent 100’s of hours building and filling with real content. And not just content for search engines…I’m talking about content for people! Not only that, but this is a non-profit site! Sure I’ve pumped content into some of my money-making sites for SEO purposes, but this is a totally different story. I can see where some of the pages could look like spam because we have seperate pages for every country in the world. The problem is we really do pray for every nation of the world, and those pages are designed to provide helpful information to our members.
Anyhow, I could rant about it for a long time but it won’t help anything. I’d remove some pages if I had to, but I don’t want to do that either because there’s currently over 19,000 pages from the site indexed in Google. I sent Yahoo customer service an email on Sept 23rd, so we’ll see if they are able to give me an explanation. I realize they’re a huge company and it’s not their responsibility to give me an answer, but hopefully the entry level CSR who reads my email will talke pity and seek out an answer for me. The ironic thing is I spend many thousands of dollars each month advertising my for-profit sites on Yahoo.
So what’s that have to do with blogging? Well supposedly blogs are a search engine’s best friend. So instead of spending hundreds of hours developing a site only to become the search engine’s “spamming enemy”, I’m going to try my hand at blogging and see how it goes. Does that mean I’m writing this blog purely for business purposes? Not at all. As you’ll see from this site and the majority of the other blogs I link to, I have a passion for online evangelism and I hope to add yet another small voice to the growing congregation of Christian bloggers whose combined efforts are impacting the internet for Christ.
