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

As I reported some time ago, if you are trying to add your own content to your My Yahoo page, recently it’s been a not-so-easily accomplished task. Well, I discovered today that it just got even worse. Now, when you hit “Add Content” on My Yahoo page, it asks you for your password. Once you type in your password it asks you for it again, and it goes on endlessly, never letting you get to the page where you actually add your feeds/content. Is it Yahoo’s preparation for its expected launch of blog search?

Business Week reports that Yahoo is going to announce next week its own blog search to catch up with Google whose blog search we have seen launched a couple weeks ago. No details are yet available as to this release so it is difficult to tell just yet how successful it is going to be.

Yahoo! has launched its new tool named Site Explorer. Here’s what Yahoo itself says about it:

What is Yahoo! Site Explorer?
The Yahoo! search database contains detailed information about the structure of the web. In addition to the web pages themselves, the database stores information about links among pages, and uses that information (as well as additional algorithms) to gauge the popularity of a given page.

Site Explorer gives you access to this information so you can learn about a site. To explore a site, you submit a URL using a search box, just as you would for a normal web search. You can then click links on the results page to see detailed information.

Basically, you get to see the site pages indexed by Yahoo and the site’s inbound links. The results can also be exported into a tab-delimited file.

Yahoo also provides APIs for this new feature, which makes it more useful for applications designed for retrieving site-specific data from Yahoo. Otherwise, I haven’t seen anything really astonishing that couldn’t be achieved previously with site: and link: searches, though there have been reports that the inbound links displayed by Site Explorer are more accurate.

everybody has to either do them, or become their victim, or run into sites doing them. Yahoo is the most recent suspect, as reported in the SearchEngineWatch blog:

Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Results Seem Hijacked? looks at the confusing situation one of our forum moderators Jeff Martin found when looking at some listings in Yahoo. They redirected through Business.com until winding up at sites that had nothing to do with that B2B search engine. Jeff also describes more here. What’s up? I posted my thoughts in the forum thread. To me, it looks like Yahoo is taking a paid inclusion feed from Business.com — hence why the click redirects through Business.com before hitting the destination sites. In other words, buy some listings in Business.com, and those are distributed also through Yahoo. That’s a long-time tactic. LookSmart long did the same.

Of course there is a thread about it on Threadwatch.org as well.

I have noticed recently that adding our RSS feeds to My Yahoo is not that easy any more. It will find the feed you enter the URL for, even display its contents, but when you click “Add to My Yahoo” it will only refresh the page you’re on and nothing else will happen, the feed won’t be added. I have tested this with different sites’ feeds, with different Yahoo accounts, from different computers with different IPs, and at different time of day and night - same thing happens. Sometimes I seem to catch it off guard and then it would add my feed, but most of the time iit seems like the server responsible for it is down - or do they turn it off on purpose, to lower the number of feeds submitted to their database through My Yahoo pages??? I can imagine now that most SEOs know and use this trick, Yahoo should be getting plenty of these submissions, so maybe they decided to if not close this backdoor completely then at least limit its accessibility to a couple hours a day only?

If that’s the case, this is not a good decision on Yahoo’s part. With Google’s launch of their new feed and blog indexing service Blog Search, Yahoo needs to stay competitive in this area as well. While of course My Yahoo Add Content service generates a lot of spam in their database - this is a source for Yahoo to get to know about completely legitimate sites publishing RSS feeds as well - not to mention the fact that officially, this service exists not even for Yahoo itself but for people to be able to use their My Yahoo page as an online aggregator for reading different feeds. Not very nice, Yahoo…