This article explains why messages may appear in search engines or on third-party web sites. Includes information on message archive settings and our policy regarding the reposting of Yahoo! Groups content.

If messages you have posted to a group are appearing in search engine results or on third-party websites, there are two possible explanations: 

The group’s message archive may be set to be viewable by "anyone."

The owner of a group controls who may access messages stored in the group's archive. If an owner sets the message archive for a group to be viewable by "anyone," search engines' "web crawlers" have access to group messages and they are likely to be indexed for search. In this event, if you do not want your posts to appear in search engines:

• If you are still a member under the same Yahoo! ID that you used to post the messages, you can delete the messages from the archive.

• If you are no longer a member and cannot delete the messages, you will need to contact the owner and request that they delete the messages for you, or change the message archive setting for the group so that the archive is only accessible to "Members."

To contact the owner, send an email to: GROUPNAME-owner@yahoogroups.com. Note: Replace "GROUPNAME" with the exact name of the group.

Note: Group owners are not required to respond to emails sent to the above address. If you do not receive a response from the owner, or if the owner is unwilling to assist you, Yahoo! Customer Care will not intervene unless the content in question conflicts with the Yahoo! Terms of Service.

To tell if a group’s message archive has been set to "anyone":

1. While logged out, go to the group’s Home page.
2. If the "Messages" link in the left-hand navigation bar is still clickable, the message archive is set to be visible by "anyone."

The messages in the group have been reposted to a blog or other site.

Reposting messages without the explicit permission of the user who posted the message is a violation of the Yahoo! Groups Guidelines and the Yahoo! Terms of Service. If you know who is reposting the message, click Get Help in the lower-right section of this page and select the "Abuse and Spam" category to contact Customer Care so that we may investigate your claim and take appropriate action.

Unfortunately, unless the site they are reposting the messages to is hosted by Yahoo!, we have no ability get the site taken down.

Note: Even after access to a group’s archive has been made private, messages have been deleted, or a third-party site has been removed, search engines may still display cached versions of messages for some period of time. In circumstances like this, you will need to contact the individual search engines to request faster removal of this content.