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Yahoo Not Deleting Advertiser Accounts, Claims Account Offline Due to Spam

posted on February 8, 2007


UPDATE: We’ve finally heard back from Yahoo. They’re claiming Florian’s account was not “lost” but taken offline for spamming.

According to Yahoo’s Kristen Wareham, “In researching his specific situation, we have come to find that his account was taken offline for quality control reasons. Our customer team reached out to Florian to explain that it had nothing to do with our new advertiser system or import tool but rather due to the lack of quality with his keywords which were not tied to any content. This is standard procedure for handling advertisers who spam our system.”

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Florian Reichling has had a very unpleasant experience with the new Yahoo Search Marketing platform. After using the bulk keyword submission option, Florian first found the account disabled…

Supposedly it is a known bug on the new Panama platform and a ticket had to be submitted to the tech group, who I was told would “get to this matter as soon as they can.” Great – here I am loosing out on a couple of thousand visitors per day and someone over at Yahoo needs to manually flip a switch to get my account back online.

Then Yahoo comes back and tells Florian that there is nothing they can do and the account is gone.

I was just told that my account cannot be brought back online and is lost – so be careful about using the bulk upload tool!

It’s hard to believe that an advertiser’s account can be permanently lost due to a glitch, but that’s what Florian is claiming. I sent an email to Yahoo, but I’ve not heard back from them. It’s one thing to have a few bugs in a new system, but unacceptable to completely lose your client’s account data.

Anyone else had their account lost due to a glitch in the new system?


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  • http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com Li Evans

    Hey Andy…. there’s been a bunch of glitches with the new Yahoo! import tool, too. We had nothing but headaches. Apparently Yahoo!’s overwhelmed and just can’t get back to people – we waited almost 2 weeks till we found a solution, after calling back numerous times.

    My colleague Greg, did a write up about it – and gave a solution to the issue with the 3rd party import tool. It’s has some real issues with negatives. Here’s a link if you’d like to read it.
    http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/2007/02/yah oos_little_s.html

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  • http://www.hanapinmarketing.com/ Pat East

    Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t think Florian’s account going offline has anything to do with Yahoo Panama nor does it have anything to do with “quality control.” I think it has to do with overzealous editors. About 6 months ago, we had a massive amount (8,000 of 10,000 keywords) of keywords taken offline due to “quality control.” When we asked Yahoo about it, we were given nearly the same response that Wareham gave. Unfortunately, it didn’t hold water. The account in question was for a health insurance company (with the keyword “health insurance” sprinkled throughout the site). They removed the keyword “health insurance” because it wasn’t related to the site. Every other keyword in the account was approved by their system (not sure how you can spam Yahoo given that they have an editorial process) and had related content on the site. After three weeks and literarily 20 phone calls, we got all of our keywords reinstated. I think the main issue isn’t Yahoo Panama per se, it’s just that Yahoo has some poor editorial policies and Yahoo Panama has created more customer service issues, which just compounds the problem.

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  • http://www.frogfear.com/ Palmer

    The way Yahoo handles keywords is crazy. I spent a small amount of money to buy some adverts for a review site (glorified blog really) that I run. I used the names of films that had been reviwed as keywords, so the add would read “Read a review of [Mission Impossible 3 for example] at etc . . .” I only used the names of films which were actually reviewed on the site. No throwing in the top film of the week just to drum up hits when I didn’t actually have any content about it.

    Yahoo removed most of these keywords on the grounds that “Contact information such as phone numbers, street or email addresses, and URLs may not be included in the title or description.” ???

    I asked them to review this, but instead they reviewed some other keywords they had removed which I hadn’t actually complained about. These keywords were sarah michelle gellar and alyson hannigan, and the advert linked to reviews of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For anyone who doesn’t know, these two actresses are the stars of that show, and their names were mentioned in the reviews (eg “Alysson Hannigan gives her best performance of the series” etc). They removed these keywords on the grounds that “Keyword is not accurately reflected in the ad”. The ad read: “Read reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at frogfear.com”(my site).

    At the same time, whenevr I search Yahoo I see loads of ads which clearly are just spam. “Looking for Sarah Michelle Gellar? Find Sarah Michelle Gellar items at etc etc”. In other words, ads which have thousands of keywords and just insert them into the text of the same ad.

    It doesn’t really bother me as I just spent $30 advertising my blog for the fun of it really, but they definitely have a lousy system.

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