February 18, 2007
In my post Yahoo delivers Hand Crafted results too I already hinted on a fact that Yahoo uses hand-job on their results. By the time of writing I only had rumours to rely on, today a hard-proof is at hand.
This screenshot published on Flickr by a rather unthoughtful Yahoo employee gives us the following:
Yahoos: Report bad results or ads Bucket test : M002
Not only it confirms all previous suspicions but also gives us some clues about Yahoo internal policies. Note, the verb Report is hyperlinked and the text itself urges Yahoos (a sidenote: what a humiliating nickname for their very own employees to accept, or perhaps Yahoo management assumes they are not literate enough to remember one rather important Irish writer of XVIII century, I’ll write a separate post on this later) to report not only bad results but also bad ADS.
Even in the early days of my SEO career I always believed that it would be silly for search engines not to use some sort of human check or handcrafting, if you will. Hence I am surprised that many including very much respected Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch as well as even more respected Threadwatch community so stubbornly refuse to believe that handcrafting is a normal practice going on all the time (while you sleep 
). Here you get it - not only SEPRs could be considered BAD but ads as well, that’s how far automatic ad placement goes in reality. Wake up and rise to the challenge - handcrafting isn’t a myth it’s a bloody reality!
Concerning the authenticity: I will not provide a direct URL of the source but anyone can easily find it on FLICKR. I wouldn’t want to grass up the person to Yahoo. However I believe this to be genuine and interestingly the screenshot itself is accompanied by the following note:
This word clitoris got into our list of keywords for Yahoo! Health so I searched to see if we actually had any content on it. It just happened to be that a coworker came by at that very moment and saw my query box & I had to explain…
As I understand the individual from whom this originates is one of those copywriters or however they call these people planted inside Yahoo communities and being paid to provide content for Yahoo portal system on the variety of subjects (clitoris included). Why this clitoris job was given to this particular person I can only guess but most likely since this person is considered to be the most knowledgable on the subject by the line management. More interesting however is the bit about Bucket test unfortunately nothing is revealed about this and I may only speculate that it could be some sort of a case identifier. Usually bucket testing associates with pool leaks and inasmuch as this screenshot is not deliberately leaked to provoke a scandal in SEO community, it serves as a hard proof for all our suspicions.
tags: lzzr, seo, serp, ads, bucket test, clitoris, communities, copywriter, genuine, hand crafted results, hand job, hard proof, scandal, suspicion, yahoo
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Yahoo | Comments (5)
February 18, 2007
As you might have noticed from my post the other day I was a bit ironic about Google Webmaster Tools thingy. It’s been noticed by many that even those highly publicized innovations like backlink checker are not working as even a simple Yahoo Site Explorer search like this one gives you much more links that are seen from Google webmaster tools. Now the hard proof emerged that Google is not only lame, but also is absolutely inadequate providing merely wrong information to webmasters. Just look at this screenshot:
I was nearly blown off my chair when I first realized that according to this lzzr.com must be ranking first for the term Yahoo on Google. I must admit that my first thought was - thank God, my suffering is over, now I am the King of the web 2.0! And immediately after I was about to rush in panic to order a dedicated server and upgrade to a wider connection fearing lzzr.com in its current state would not stand the traffic explosion. Alas, there are no miracles in this world and I did not take me long to come back to reality and see that this simply can not be true 
Now the questions are: If this isn’t in fact true than
- Why on earth Google is lying to me?
- What actually Google shows me?
The former one is easier to answer as it seems Google had become paranoid about disclosing even the smallest bit of info that might provide food for thought and help understanding their algos. I’ve mentioned already that Yahoo has a completely opposite policy: while Google becomes more and more secretive, they open as much as they can whuch is very helpful in daily SEO work.
The latter is a kind of nutter as I simply can not believe what I see and the only explaination for this I can find is that Google displays some kind of “microwawe-ready” results for ranking and the real ones go through an extensive cooking process before being served to the customer. I can only guess that at a certain stage in their SERP calculation lzzr.com indeed happened to rank first for Yahoo term (could it be due to my ingenious eSEO? LOL). I can even suspect that this might be so since I used a good old Yahoo regional domain seo trick but otherwise I have no clue as you don’t really think I am mad enough to optimize for Yahoo?
Ultimately, it all boils down to the fact that something is rotten in the kingdom of Google as it displays such crap and wants me to believe in it.
PS Nevertheless, how I wish it was true LOL!!!
tags: google webmaster tools, lzzr, seo, serp, yahoo, yahoo site explorer, cheat, eseo, hard proof, ironic, panic, paranoid, secretive, seo trick, traffic explosion, web 2.0
Posted by LZZR under Google, Blog | Comments (5)
February 12, 2007
Another addition to my SEDD collection - Google itself produced a small guide to SEDD, I quote from their Webmaster Guidelines
- Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
- Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Yes, we all can read between the lines and are used to the usual kind of understatement coming from Google headquarters. Here they effectively stated that any site found in proximity to so-called bad neighborhoods or using WebPosition Gold will be severely penalized. Here is the evil part that makes SEDD possible. Due to the weakness of Google antispam algos that can not rely on on-site factors alone in fighting spam they begin to punish for aspects that are not under control of any individual webmaster. As long as it is true it is enough in words of Google guys themselves to link to any site from well-known spammy bunches or to release Webposition Gold to any website to achieve its inevitable deranking. Quite a recipie I suppose! Hire a good henchman from the blackhat cohort who owns thousands of spammy adobes or fire up the abovementioned software and kaboom your competitor is sinking and can do nothing about it.
tags: google, lzzr, pagerank, seo, webposition gold, antispam, bad neighborhoods, blackhat, henchman, link schemes, links, pages, recipie, spammers, spammy, submit, webmaster
Posted by LZZR under SEDD, Blog | Comments (0)
February 10, 2007
As I noticed elsewhere already, Yahoo had gone crazy. Now it seems it’s a deliberate strategy. It looks like they’ve got offended by Google’s near-monopoly and decided to aid those who are more than happy to exhaust Googlebot and Google spam-filters with millions of pages of duplicate content.
First Yahoo makes their Y360 blog service to compulsory re-publish content in their Geocities blog, and now this!
They just released Yahoo Pipes a service that allows you to mash up any number of feed sources and get them out as a new combined feed they call a pipe. Being a pipe smoker myself I can’t help appreciating their naming convention, despite they actually derive it from Unix pipes, not from smoking ones. I simply stick with my interpretation.
Put it in your pipe, burn it and smoke it!
That’s what is on offer and what makes it the ultimate splogging tool. Get any kind of syndicated content, mix and mash it in pipes and here you go. You only need to have basic wordpress skills and a couple of good plugins to make a perfect splog. So splogging for everyone, splogging for the masses!
I don’t mind, but what is going to happen to the unique content mantra of recent days. With this tool you can dilute anybody’s unique content in three clicks.
It’s not that I am not appreciating the effort. It’s easy and fun working with their fancy Web 2.0 interface and making all those pipes connect in a nice drainage system. I felt like a real plumber at work. You have to try it to enjoy it! I even made my own combined feed and loaded it to a eSEO test site.
Get a nice screenshot of their interface:
tags: google, googlebot, lzzr, seo, yahoo pipes, bseo, eseo, pipe, plugin, smoking, spam, splog, unique content, wordpress, yahoo
Posted by LZZR under Yahoo | Comments (4)
February 7, 2007
BLIP
Going through my Backlinks on Yahoo Site Explorer I suddenly realized that it displays all backlinks regardless. There were open links, links with nofollow attribute in a tag as well as links from pages with meta robots nofollow.
This doesn’t mean Yahoo ignores nofollow as it may still exclude it from their link popularity algos but definetly it counts them all and possibly sends their spiders along.
This actually bothers me a lot - do they spider nofollow links too?
tags: blip, lzzr, seo, yahoo, yahoo site explorer, backlink, backlinks, link, link popularity, meta, nofollow, robots, spider
Posted by LZZR under Search Engine Blips | Comments (2)
February 6, 2007
During the recent google dance not only we suffered the usual (i. e. disappearance of entire sites together with jumping PR) but also it stopped displaying backlinks in any comprehencible manner. I switched to Yahoo! Site Explorer to see my backlinks!
But now, hurray! The announcement comes from the babe-swamped heart of Googleplex - you can actually see your backlinks and we always knew about them, just did not want to show them to you. Here we go.
Very nice you think. At last you’ll be able again like in good old times see who links to you and who links to your competition and refine your linking strategy.
No, no no. Not so fast, buddy! It’s OK for you to see your backlinks but don’t evn think of trying to get more intelligence on your rival. We’ll show to the world the usual crap and only you will be able to see the true picture, but only about your own site - says Google.
Effectively, hiding backlinks from the public by de-facto disabling link: operator option in their search whilst at the same time giving only registered webmasters see a bit of their backlinks via Google Webmaster Tools interface they provide all big cats who can afford professional SEO monitoring with a huge and unfair advantage over those small guys who struggle to lift their Web 2.0 estate off the ground.
In contrast Yahoo opens their Site Explorer API to everyone thus allowing the commoners at least to see who links whom
tags: google webmaster tools, lzzr, seo, web 2.0, yahoo, yahoo! site explorer, backlink, backlinks, estate, google, google dance, linking strategy
Posted by LZZR under Google | Comments (1)
