May 30, 2007
Internet censorship seems to be a rather far-fetched issue until it actually affects you directly and personally.
I admit I do things that make a lot of people angry and this time it seems Yahoo! Inc itself decided to get angry with me! I perfectly well know why as my post on Yahoo handcrafting describing exactly how Yahoo! employees fiddle with your seach results clearly annoyed some of them as it was their own stupidity that allowed this information to leak out to the publc domain.
Now they are making some effort attempting to stop it from spreading - all feeds from my website lzzr.com had been blocked in Yahoo! Pipes and effectively censored out. No more Yahoo Pipes for LZZR.com!
Of course they are in their own right as it is their service and they are to decide which feeds to allow to Yahoo! Pipes and which to block out. I am not in a position to deny them this right. Neither I am in a position to deny them their right to act stupid. It’s been prooven too many times that repressive measures like censoring information resources you don’t like always results in an opposite effect! It gets spread by other channels and tends to snowball at each revolution.
Hopefully this is not the official policy of Yahoo! Inc as I don’t believe their top management is stupid enough to ruin their new project by introducing selective censorship. Most likely it is a personal revenge of a certain Yahoo! employee whose actions resulted in leakage of sensitive information. I have reasons to believe this person had to go through some hard times as a result of this blunder. Now this individual seems to be making another mistake.
On the other hand I may be wrong and somewhere at the top level of Yahoo! there is a clear policy of cutting out websits publishing information that is not exactly favoured by Yahoo. Not surprising and equally stupid considering the fact that Yahoo Inc attitudes towards censorship once already resulted in an enormous PR disaster when in 2005 Yahoo collaborated with Communist China helping Chinese authorities to imprison a journalist for 10 years. Shi Tao, a reporter who worked for the Contemporary Business News nwespaper in China was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message. At this time Yahoo! was accused by Western media of providing Chinese investigating organs with information that helped link Shi Tao’s personal e-mail account and the text of the message to his computer.
Allow me a quote from BBC News website:
“We already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
So, it may well be that Yahoo! Inc simply likes censorship policies since Yahoo! record on sensorship looks rather consistent - from acting as a Chinese police informant to censoring their owns search results and individual websites.
tags: shi tao, yahoo, yahoo pipes, blunder, censorship, internet, policy, scandal, search results
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Yahoo | Comments (5)
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)
January 20, 2007
When you go through SEO FAQ pages or ask an average SEO guru or a Search Engine spokesperson if Search Engine Ranking of your site can be deliberately harmed by your competitor the answer is always short and definitive: NO, no site can be harmed this way. Work to improve your site and you will score, don’t think about your competition this way!
Some recent events demonstrate that the issue is not necessarily so black-and-white.
In a remarkable post last month titled How Google handles hacked sites Matt Cutts in a rather amateur PR (I mean Public Relationships in a very old-fashioned sense) exercise describes a story in which a popular website gets hacked and how Google handles this case. A predictable happy-end crowns the story and we can’t help applauding the gracious and the merciful power of the almighty Google.
It’s not that I am taking pleasure watching the chief Google PR officer having to apologize facing another popular uprising. Neither I am worried too much about petty little sites that usually deserve much less attention and much less forgiving from the merciful one. Incidentally this case provoked quite a slightly different line of thought.
The site in question is a well-known established resource never accused of any kind of spamming activities before. The punishment administered to the site seems far too severe - not just a penalty imposed on the the ranking but a complete exclusion. I quote:
the site was classified as hacked and spammy. We stopped showing it for user queries.
Evidently it was known to Google that the site was hacked most likely webmastes had nothing to do with it, apart from being slightly careless about the security issue. So, the site itself was only indirectly responsible for the event and only via a certain degree of negligence, the punishment however was administered to the fullest extent whilst the guilty party, the culprit went unpunished. Hackers in this case had no intention to harm SEPRs of the site, they were just hunting for incoming links to their doorways. The site itself fell victim of a crossfire whilst being just an innocent bystander. It is not so difficult though to imagine that some other hackers may have a completely opposite objective and try to use the same trick to exclude, albait temporarily the victim site from search engines. In most cases one does not even need to hack a victim website to inflict damage on SEPRs. Merely placing the victim into a Bad Neighbourhood might suffice.
I have no intention of publicising or even disclosing all possible tactics that might lead to eventual SED or even exclusion of a victim site - I really fear it might set a Genie out of the bottle. Suffice to say that any literate SEO practitioner with a bit of experience can quickly design a range of tactics deliberately designed to harm SEPRs of their competitors. I propose calling such tactics SEDD - Search Engine Deliberate Deranking (as opposed to SEO proper).
The Ostrich approach to the problem prevalent at the time of writing will help no more… Unless there will be clear guidelines regarding possible SEDD issued by the major serach engines, such practice may start snowballing and this spells a disaster for all of us. So there are some questions to be asked and perhaps answered by those known to speak on behalf of our Big Brothers (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Namely, how Search Engines will behave in hypothetical cases of SEDD and is there any guarantee that SEDD is not being practiced already?
terms SED (Search Engine Deranking) and SEDD (Search engine Deliberate Deranking) are copyright © LZZR.com
tags: google, msn, sed, sedd, seo, sepr, yahoo, deranking, hacked, hacking, lzzr.com, tactics
Posted by LZZR under SEDD, SEO Ethics, Google | Comments (4)
September 5, 2006
I was in a funny mood writing this post and now QuadsZilla comes with this question: Is Black Hat SEO Officially Mainstream?. Well things are not just bad, they are real bad indeed.
Painting my gloomy picture I assumed two things:
- Good Will of Mainstream Webmasters/Webowners
- General Taboo on the use of autogenerated text
QuadsZilla projects these limitations fading away and indeed there are no rational reasons to believe that they wouldn’t.
If so we are facing a situation where big players having immeasurably more resources than any SEO could ever pull will outdo any individual SEO effort in a blink. After this they’ll start fighting each other - dirty and violently. As a result this will degrade textual information and textual communication and devalue it almost to a zero. Innocent civilians AKA common internet users will run away from this battlefield. Seems we are about to see a rapid shift towards visual and audio as a media (i. e. back to the good old Telly). Aren’t we are seeing it already? Flickrs and Podcasts, MP3 and HDTV they are all here.
I have to get out and go for a walk right now as it made me sick thinking about the good old internet collapsing in a year or so…
tags: blackhat, mainstream, seo, autogenerated text
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Blog | Comments (0)
June 28, 2006
What recently had been happening with Google SEPR is not even a cause for concern - it is a full scale disaster. The bad data push that crowned the big daddy update seems just the beginning.
Google is clearly not capable to deliver what it had promised at the beginning - adequate search results.
Where do we stand after all this? Before in SEPR we had either whiter-than-white websites combined with gray but tolerable rubbish only occasionally tainted by messy cloaking - we see something different now. However surprising this may sound, but I am not particularly worried by the increasing amount of spam in Google results. Blackhat SEO was always at the periphery before and as long as those whiter-than-white websites safely dwelled at the top in their niche and had nothing to fear the game was set and playable by all sides. The mess recenly created by Google seemingly agitated even the white giants and for a good reason. No one is safe now. Perfectly legitimate sites disappear for months and those which do not seem to be having a pretty bumpy ride. The Amazon example is inasmuch laughable as it is ridiculous.
What is the greatest punishment Google can administer - BAN your site, i. e. drop it from their results altogether. This only (not the lack of money) was the greatest deterrent against using grayhat and blackhat SEO techniques for most. This is going to change. If your whiter-than-white site disappears from Google for no reason at all and the only way to get it back is to use blackhat what sort of ethical considerations will stop you? Surely not the bad data push excuse!
Now suppose the worst - white giants will start using blackhat en masse. Already struggling Google will harden its algos and euristics and more innocent bystanders will be hit and will fall out from the index resorting to blackhatting as a result. You may call it a vicious circle or a positive feedback depending on your current mood (pessimistic or optimistic respectively) but whatever we call it it looks pretty shitty anyway.
PS the emphasis is shifting towards the industrial-scale blogging anyway. Expect Technorati to become the next Google.
tags: google, seo, bad data pool, bad data push, big daddy update, black hat
Posted by LZZR under SEO Ethics, Google | Comments (1)
