Appears on your Chase (CHASE FREE CHECKING) statement as Yahoo REVERSALPPD ID: 2000223247 on May 6
Appears on your Chase (CHASE FREE CHECKING) statement as Yahoo EDI PAYMTSPPD ID: 2000223247 on Apr 30

I’m sending them an email to figure out what this is about. I like being paid, I don’t like so much money being taken away. And, oddly, in Yahoo Publisher I’m setup to receive a check, not an ACH. So, I don’t even know which Yahoo service is screwing around with my bank account!

Update: As I thought, it was Yahoo Publisher:

Hello Elliott,

In response to your email, we apologize for any confusion this transaction may have caused. We had some technical difficulties with this month’s payment cycle that caused several of our publishers to see such transactions on their banking statements. We are sorry for this error.

We have since confirmed that as of May 1st, 2009 we have resolved this billing issue and all misprinted payments have been reversed. We would advise to contact your banking institution for confirmation.

We understand that all banking institutions have their own policies regarding holding periods for pending payments. We would advise to contact your banking institution for confirmation of the payment reversal. Typically, it may take up to 5 business days for pending payments to drop off.

If you have any further inquiries, we would like to speak to you via phone. We may be reached at 866-785-2636. Our hours of operation are Mondays through Fridays from 7:00 am to 5:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.

Please feel free to contact us via email once more if you have any further concerns.

Sincerely,

Kristell Larios
Yahoo! Publisher Network

I had two domains with Yahoo–one of which I don’t even use–so I was surprised to see them charge me $34.95 for each domain for a single year’s renewal. That’s right, Yahoo charged me $70 to renew two domains, more than four times what a market-rate provider like GoDaddy would have charged. And, I wasn’t given any advance notice that I’d be charged through the nose on renewal.

The key is in noticing those notorious “details.” If you click on them, the pricing structure is clearly laid out–yes, Yahoo will screw you every way they can–they’re quite willing to tell you.

That’s right, if you sign-up for a year of a domain using their ridiculously low $1.99 initial price, the next year when they automatically renew your domain will cost you $34.95. Your total cost comes to $18.47 a year if you go with Yahoo.

Yahoo Sucks… oh yes they do…

Try searching for name, Elliott Back on Yahoo and you get absolutely nothing:

I tried adding my feed to Yahoo Site Explorer but it’s been 50 minutes and it hasn’t been indexed yet. I’m going to contact Webmaster Support and see what comes. My suspicion is that this is a side-effect from the rapid adoption by others of WP Autoblog, which links back to me, one of the reasons I stopped distributing it.

Update: I submitted my feed at 05/17/2007 14:18:01 and it was processed on 05/17/2007 14:26:18. Apparently it took a long time to get reported as processed, but the processing itself happened within 10 minutes.

Update 2: Well so far nothing. If any Yahoo people stop by, drop me a note or give me a call and we can get this sorted out.

Update 3: I emailed a friendly Yahoo employee who might be able to help, and also signed up for their paid search inclusion, “search submit basic,” which hopefully can nudge the site back into the index. Although, I don’t feel right paying for being indexed, it feels too black hat.

Update 4: I got the following email back from Yahoo:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines located at: help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Below are some answers to common questions regarding this issue:

Q: What are some of the common reasons that a site may violate Yahoo!’s Content Policy Guidelines?

A: Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines (link above) outline what we are and are not looking for in pages that we index. Listed below are some of the more common reasons that a site may violate these guidelines:

- Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site)
- Massive domain interlinking- Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content
- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka “link farms”)
- Hidden text
- Excessive keyword repetition

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the SiteMatch inclusion program?

A: All pages submitted to SiteMatch are editorially reviewed. If a site has a judgment against it, it is likely to be rejected by the SiteMatch program.

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the Yahoo! Express directory inclusion program?

A: Yes, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search Index are different systems. Inclusion or exclusion from one does not affect the other.

Q: How can I have my site re-reviewed?

A: Please review our content quality guidelines to make sure that your site meets all of them. When you feel the site is ready, please complete the form located at: add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview requesting a re-review of your site. You may wish to include an explanation of unique features on your site, or details of changes to your site’s content that may assist our editors in their evaluation.

Please allow several weeks for the review process, YST indexing, and a complete refresh of the database before checking search.yahoo.com to see if your site is listed in the Yahoo!Search Index. We do not offer specifics detailing how an individual site is not in compliance with our guidelines, but we will review your site individually. You will not be
receiving further notification regarding your request for a second review, and we are not able to offer the option of another review.

Thank you for taking the time to make the Yahoo! Search Index better.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Evan

Yahoo! Customer Care
www.yahoo.com/

Uh, this email contains no information that could help me understand why I’m banned from Yahoo, or how to correct that ban. Thanks for the … wasted bits in cyberspace!

Coincidentally, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) is also tracking information on Google AdSense — how many clicks Google AdSense ads are receiving (on webpages that have both MyBlogLog and AdSense installed), the ad unit size, and what webpage those clicks occurred. Yahoo doesn’t know the CPC for each of Google’s ads, but they do know the click-through rate (CTR) — and can specifically target high CTR publishers first, with their YPN offering.

Then in the “we made a huge bug” department, Yahoo charged their $1000 bill 50 times to a guy’s credit card, which would definitely suck for him:

Yahoo! experienced a technical issue that caused the credit cards of a few advertisers to be charged incorrectly on Wednesday, February 14. Some credit cards were authorized for one or more charges in error.

We caught this early and were able to halt the process before the charges were actually completed. We’re very sorry for any issues this might have caused you and we’re doing everything possible to completely resolve the situation as quickly as possible, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, the transition to their new Advertising platform Panama is probably not going as smoothly as they’d like, with much internal patching and scurrying, but over the next few months these kind of events will probably fade away. Bugs are to be expected with change, as are accusations of “under the table” business practices.

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

The idea is quite simple. Yahoo Pipes lets users take everyday RSS feeds and mash them together with Yahoo APIs, other feeds, and programmatic building blocks in an easy to use graphical environment. Unfortunately, the execution is terrible and buggy. Take, for example, this yahoo pipe I created to scan the NYT feed for locations / keywords and insert flickr images as appropriate:

The first thing you might notice is that it doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to. Well, we’ll come to that in a minute. You’ll also notice a lot of & going around–every time I hit save it re-encoded the original ampersand. How irritating. Worse is how their pipes are so watered down they can’t do anything:

All I wanted to do was take some content, for each item do content analysis and geo analysis, and use those outputs as the input to a flickr search, then append the photo to the text snippet. Well, first you can’t fork a data stream into two bits and recombine them later. So scratch two kinds of analysis. Second, the outputs of content/geo analysis can’t be used to populate the inputs of the flickr data source–an obvious problem. And third, the annotation feature useless doesn’t annotate, it just replaces chunks messily.

Yahoo, your pipes are indeed clogged.