This post is rather long... but please read... this to could happen to you. I need your help. Please comment below if you have a similar experience or if you are just shocked as well.  

Are you tired of getting traffic to your web site from Yahoo? Want to make sure those pesky visitors stop coming to your site? Yep, you are hearing me right. There is a way that your site could lose almost all traffic from Yahoo.... and you decide is it the fault of Yahoo or McAfee SiteAdvisor?  

I work for a large real estate company, but in the face of Yahoo and McAfee I seem to be a sticky bug on someone's shoe.  

And so the story begins... Once upon a time....  

McAfee has a product called SiteAdvisor. It is a toolbar you can install or a site you can visit and it will tell you which sites are 'safe' or not safe to visit. Recently Yahoo started incorporating SiteAdvisor ratings alongside Yahoo's search results. So when you search on Yahoo, it will automatically look up SiteAdvisor ratings and display them inline with the results - tell you if a site is safe to visit.  

How McAfee Rated Crye-Leike  

At the end of 2007 McAfee SiteAdvisor found crye-leike.com not safe to visit. A big red warning is displayed over our site (and all subdomains). I know this is a mistake. So I started trying to figure out how to get it corrected.  

What Happens When You Try to Get an Inaccurate SiteAdvisor Rating Corrected...  

Enter a customer service hell. Yes, it doesn't get worse than this. McAfee support for SiteAdvisor is officially the worst customer service I have ever experienced.

• I have submitted requests online.
• I have had online chat conversations with several people (all of whom take at least 20 minutes to sort of understand my initial question).
• I have emailed their complaints department.
• I have contacted their sales team.
• I have emailed/called all the numbers, emails, web forms I could find.
• I posted help in their forums.
• I searched online.
• I commented on other blogs.

I have been trying to get this corrected for months now. With this endless work our site was finally moved to the yellow 'retesting' category. However I have yet to receive an actual reply or contact about this.  

Yahoo's Part

When Yahoo started incorporating the ratings in their search result, I contacted them. I wanted them to know that the information was not accurate. That I wanted it removed. That I had been trying with non-existent McAfee support to get it corrected.  That Yahoo should take responsibility for what they display on their site. Yahoo's final answer, "Regretfully, Yahoo! cannot change a McAfee decision on a site's rating, as their decision is final."

Wow. It's one thing to have the wrong information to SiteAdvisor users, but its another thing to have wrong information for Yahoo users. I am utterly disappointed in Yahoo's sense of accountability for its own services. Yet another reason to use google.  

I maintain that McAfee has made an error in their rating for crye-leike.com. If they are going to give a site a 'bad reputation' with a big red warning sign, they need to produce a program with more legitimacy - proven results - methods for correction - and some actual support. This impacts thousands of people who work for Crye-Leike and depend on the reputation of the brand name in advertising.

It is absolutely wrong what McAfee is doing to damage reputations of web sites with total abandon and disregard. It is also wrong of Yahoo to incorporate the results with no process for correction.  

This blog post is the last thing I can think of to do to try and get the rating corrected on our site or at least try to make people aware of how McAfee and Yahoo are treating people.