Yahoo! really manages to mess up on a regular basis.  If you've ever experienced a Yahoo! penalty - you know something is rotten at the Yahoo! HQ. But, let's take a closer look at the Yahoo! penalty box first. Let's assume your not trying to buy your way to the top with Yahoo! paid inclusion or utterly waste money on Yahoo! basic submit. How do you know you are being penalized by Yahoo? 1) you don't appear on page one (or position#1) when searching for your company name or home page URL. 2) you notice a drastic drop off in Yahoo! traffic - literally on one day, off the next with an occasional steep decline instead 3) no pages from your site indexed by Yahoo!  or even worse all of your pages indexed but you receive absolutely no Yahoo! traffic.  I've seen sites with a hundred thousand pages in the Yahoo! index that receive 20K visitors per day from Google, but manage to get no visitors from Yahoo!. Ok, lets assume you are getting penalized... Are you violating Yahoo!'s content quality guidelines - yes, they are nebulous and meaningless but they are worth a quick scan. If you're sure you are not being penalized, you are probably wrong.  Somehow, some way -  Yahoo! is pissed at your site. If you're still convinced you can not possibly be violating their terms -  go ahead and submit the Yahoo! Search URL Status Review Form. Otherwise, start cleaning up the site.  I've seen excessive links on the homepage trigger a Yahoo! penalty.  I've seen outbound links to other banned Yahoo! sites trigger a penalty.  I believe I've seen cloaking trigger a penalty and I believe I've seen excessive sitewide interlinking trigger it as well.  After you have wasted a lot of time guessing and executing various clean ups your are again ready for the Yahoo! Search URL Status Review Form. At this point, I've never heard of someone actually receiving feedback fromYahoo! as a result of submitting the form.  (If you've received a response from Yahoo! on a penalty inquiry, I'd love to hear from you). For more reading check out Rand Fishkin on Yahoo! penalties.   The bottom line is that Yahoo! is a bad product and is totally unresponsive when it comes to dealing with the Webmasters that have helped build the Yahoo! index.  Google is 1000% better when it comes to penalties, cleaning up your site and returning traffic. Early signs are that Bing is easily outpacing Yahoo! - perhaps Yahoo! going dark isn't too far in the future.