What should you do if your site was banned by Yahoo? I had a site in this situation. It was not indexed by Google and Yahoo no matter what I did. I fixed all the problems: the broken link (it had one in the beginning), added original content at the home page, correct the others. I put alt tags to the images and everything looked good. I generated sitemap files and submitted. I suggested my client to contact Yahoo - he did and of course the answer was ...that the pages may not have been indexed or they may not be in the top results for the searches. There were no current indications that my pages have been blocked from the Yahoo! index. I understood nothing - they did not block it but it is not indexed!!! Strange situation. Looking again at the page I was thinking that there were only 2 possibilities: I said to myself: "This can be banning or robots". But the site had no robots.txt file. So I checked again the home page. So what do you think I found?

< META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="None" >!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you know what this means? If you are an English teacher you will say - this means that the robots.txt file has no content. But the language used to write a meta tag is not English, it's HTML.

In HTML, < META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="None" > is equivalent with < META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" > which means, DO NOT index the page, DO NOT follow the links of this page.

Could you imagine that? The webmaster of the page blocked the access at the home page of the site! Who could believe that this could happen? But it did. So next time when you suppose your site was banned by Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, take a look in the robots.txt file. Does the site not have a robots.txt file? Check the html code for the robots meta tag. If you are not sure what you should write in it, you better delete it until you learn. Its absence says nothing to search engines, you will have no problem.

Gabi Andrei is one of the SEO experts working with IT Hut USA Inc - search engine optimization company.