Yahoo! Please don’t ignore your “registered” users :-(

I have been using Yahoo since its inception (or little after its inception). Customer service was rocking at Yahoo in early 1990s. If my memory serves me right I am pretty sure Yahoo email was released after the release of their directory. I use to submit the URLs of mahesh.com (which was a India specific directory earlier, the new avatar can be seen on Oneindia.in). If I did’t see the URL being included in 48 hours I use to send them an email and a human use to be in touch with me. Life was good.

Today, Yahoo has just pushed their loyal users aside. This is my second posting about Yahoo not getting back to feedback emails, you can imagine how upset I am. To give you an example, let me talk about the sitemap submission.

Google was the first portal major to introduce submission of URLs thru sitemaps (cool idea). Yahoo also offered the same service (but very late) but I guess they did not want to read the same file from websites as Google was reading. So they decided webmasters had to list all the URLs in a file called urllist.txt. Not a problem. Finally Google, Yahoo and MSN agreed to work with each other and respect the common sitemap protocol. (If anyone has successfully submitted sitemaps to MSN please do email me. MSN is just not willing to publish the submission guidelines on their site. Very rude.)

Recently I logged into the Yahoo site explorer account and was surprised to see a “New” icon (for Preferences). I wondered why Yahoo did not feel it was important enough to send an email to all their site explorer users announcing this new feature? Recently Google introduced their new version of Google Analytics (which rocks!). They promptly sent an email to all their users. Yahoo, please be in touch with your users. It is very much appreciated by us.

A small suggestion to Google and Yahoo about their sitemap utility – at times you encounter an error in the sitemap file submitted (bad URLs, network problem, blah blah). Why don’t you send an email to the user with a simple message “Your profile www.mahesh.com has some errors. Please login to your sitemap/explorer account for details”. This would help. I hope somebody is listening.