Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

So, I guess everyone has seen the new layout of Yahoo’s homepage right? I haven’t paid much attention to it initially but then at some point I had to access Yahoo MyWeb from their homepage. Take a simple test: how long will it take you to find a way to access it if you’re on a newly redesigned homepage and you don’t use search? It took me logging into an account that had MyWe set up and being used already and saving a link to be able to access it. I couldn’t find it in the list of all Yahoo services even. My Yahoo was prominent enough everywhere but no trace of MyWeb.
So what does that mean? Is Yahoo not happy about the way MyWeb worked out? Do they intend to quit using/supporting it? This is really weird seeing how everybody on the contrary moves towards social bookmarking, social networking and otehr stuff. (Has it been spammed too hard - or even worse, has that spam actually affected the search results??? I have a couple more guesses but won’t voice them now until I’ve seen proof that I was wrong or right)

(notice
The launch of Yahoo! Answers beta last December seemed to go unnoticed, by Threadwatch members at least. However, looking at it now, I see a lot of activity going on. Some is serious questions, some is plain BS, the topics ranging from philosophy to cartoons. Some posters are advertizing their services, sure thing. Funny to compare it to Gary Price’s overview posted at the time of the launch and see his predictions come true.

There is a similar service offered by Google but it’s old (notice ©2003 on the FAQ page?) and seems like everybody has forgotten about it by now - though people still use it pretty actively.

EGOL over at SEOMoz did a post on domain searches using Overture Keyword tool revealing a lot of interesting aspects regarding the “brand strength” and type-ins. While providing some food for thought, this information doesn’t seem very applicable in the practical sense - or does it?

Over the last few days, I got several phishing emails from folks posing as PayPal. Nothing unusual about it, of course. What was interesting about those emails, though, is that instead of trying to make me believe theirphishingsite.com was indeed PayPal they did it subtler - they provided a link to a Google or Yahoo search. Kinda pays to rank #1 for your own name doesn’t it?

I did some Google hacking this morning. Gmail seemed to have some problems, it wasn’t really down but their server kinda slowed down. I went to check if anybody else has noticed that and came across a load of posts from a year ago with people reporting Gmail problems and blaming the beta for instability. Well, since regular google search doesn’t report anything recent (despite the huge number of blog posts in the results) I thought I’d check the blog search on Google. Results sorted by relevance didn’t appear to be recent, and results sorted by date had a lot of mentions of Gmail but nothing about it going down. However, what caught my eye is the abundance of gmail addresses posted out there for any email spammer to pick… when will they learn? Until they do, Gmail will be kept very busy filtering out all the spam and mass mailing stuff.

As for recent Yahoo news, I just noticed that My Yahoo  started displaying favicons for the RSS feeds you place on it. Not major news of course but we have seen a lot of buzz about other interface tweaks (2, 3, 4, 5)recently so why not post about this one. (In case you’re wondering why I call the big Technorati news about the authority filter an interface tweak - well, if you haven’t noticed they actually had that implemented in a slightly different form already - they only came up with a new interface element. Before, you could simply sort the results of your Technorati blog search by authority - sure it stil displayed them all and only changed the order - but that was actually the first step towards what’s big news today).

Randfish mentioned egosurf, a tool that calculates how much you are associated with your own blog/site/whatever. Well I just ran it for myself out of curiosity, and this is what it told me:

ego points
irishwonder
4810
www.google.com

On Yahoo it’s even better:

ego points
irishwonder
5809
www.yahoo.com

The way they do it is pretty interesting and I’d love to have a tool for deep link analysis based on the same principle (on the second thought, there it is, right? *). One more interesting thought inspired by this toy is that this could be a criterion for choosing the right SEO - where do they rank for their own name/company name? I mean, come on, if you can’t rank #1 for your own name what can you do for other people?

They also have a link for suggesting more features for the tool - I didn’t suggest it there directly but will say here what I thought would be neat - they should make something people could place on their sites/blogs to display their points - with a link back to egosurf - So here we go, a free linkbait idea for you guys - no need to thank me but I’m not placing a direct link to you until you implement this feature

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* - Oops I probably shouldn’t have posted it, now everyone and their fleas will use it for that until the lads implement captchas or something….. oh well….

Seems like everybody’s busy creating terrible sounding new words - the one I just ran into is Shoposphere, mentioned by SEW’s Chris Sherman in this post about Yahoo expanding its shopping search. I am not sure if this is the first mention of the word, and feel reluctant to really research this. Anyway, this is one more word along with splogs and splogosphere that I don’t like at all - it just sounds too unnatural.

An update: it appears that Yahoo itself came up with the word! - Ugh….

I came across Netvibes and got curious to look at what it is and what it can be used for. First of all, it should be noted that this thing has a PR of 7, with 7,060 baclinks reported by Google. This alone makes it a desirable place to drop your links/rss feeds at - but judging by the number of pages indexed by Google, clearly the personalized pages cannot be indexed - which makes sense of course, otherwise I’d be concerned about ym privacy. As for the features Netvibes personalized page provides, they include RSS feeds (you can add your own ones), web search in Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and Wikipedia, weather casts, an option to check your Gmail inbox (or even several Gmail boxes if need be), Bookmarks and some other stuff. I haven’t noticed anything suggesting any information exchange between the users of this system, or any other public means of use of the information submitted by each individual user through his personalized page - which makes it a nice and convenient (and probably pretty secure and private) way to handle your personal stuff - but renders it totally useless for any SEO/black hat purposes…

I have stumbled across some sites and links that made me wonder whether the infamous “link condoms” are really as effective against comment spam as they are claimed to be. I did some research and the results are earth-shaking. Looks like we don’t even need to overcome the “rel=”nofollow”" attribute any more (and never had to?) to comment spam effectively. I will be posting the details of my research and findings at the Syndk8 forums today.

I was doing a site: search on Yahoo and Yahoo came up with a sponsored search result! lovely isn’t it… People seem to be plainly wasting money.

I have attended Yahoo’s booth on eComXpo today. Among other things, they present their Publisher Network - but here’s a scandalous part about it. Quoting their presentation,

Take advantage of Yahoo! Publisher tools, services and programs. Integrate other Yahoo! services into your web site, including Add to My Yahoo! (RSS), Y!Q and much more to come…

Problem is, when you click the link to see Add to My Yahoo! (RSS) in action, it still isn’t functioning properly! I double checked in two browsers - and all I could see is the same thing I have reported earlier today… You’d think they would at least show functioning stuff at an event like that…