Hard Proof of Yahoo Handcrafting
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 |
Hard Proof of Yahoo hand editing Search Results…
It’s been a matter of hot debates in SEO community lately - now all the rumours have to end here as we have a hard proof on our hands. A screenshot carelessly published by a Yahoo employees reveals an insider information confirming that it is a common…
Trackback by Anonymous — March 8, 2007 @ 8:11 am
Wow. hard proof eh? LZZR, if you ran one of the largest search engines in the world, would you want to leverage the help of your 10,000+ employees who spend 8 hours a day using your search engine for quality testing?
Using that link to report spammy results alerts people in Search to check it out. Period. No big story here LZZR, sorry.
Comment by myscreenshot — April 3, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
I begg to differ on this - it is a BIG STORY and I’ll try to explain why I think so.
In SEO business we operate under illusion that things like this could not possibly happen. This underlying assumption is what keeps SEO business running, otherwise the whole SEO industry is pointless.
I personally always believed that all big players contrary to their own statements use handcrafting on their SERPs at least for a sample of the most competitive keywords precisely for reasons mentioned in your post:
It’s been shocking that for several years most SEO Gurus were or at least pretended to be in denial (and it ain’t a river in Egypt) about this and demanded a hard proof - here you get it at last!
Now why this whole issue is so important. We assume that SERPs are delivered as a result of clever algorithms executed by a computer - in other words they are done by a machine, not a human being and hence can be positioned as impartial and objective. As soon as you introduce a human check into the system you inevitably have to deal with subjectivity. What’s the difference, you ask, who cares if the SERPs are done by a machine or as a result of human editing? The difference is of the crucial nature and it is systemic! To put it simple - you can not bribe a computer but you very well can bribe a human checker. In a multi-billion search engine marketing industry I doubt there will be no webmasters willing to offer and no search engine employees willing to accept bribes for human editing SE results in a particular way. It is systemic because with this you create a system that is unsustainable as in order to prevent internal abuse of the system will have to introduce levels and levels of supervisors over initial layer of handcrafters thus introducing a cancerous ulcer into the system.
And please, don’t tell me that this will never happen because in general human nature is good and every search engine employee would rather starve to death than accept a small private donation (read - bribe) - we’ve seen it all, just look at the level of DMOZ corruption (if you happen to be unaware of this search for corrupt DMOZ editors or something along these lines in Google).
I hope I managed if not to convince you than at least to explain why to me this is indeed a BIG STORY.
Comment by LZZR — April 7, 2007 @ 6:29 pm
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