Yahoo! Search Now Supports Bogus Webmaster Stats

I was sad to see Barry's post about Yahoo! showing garbage stats to unauthenticated users.

Not that they asked for it, but here is my advice for Yahoo! Search:

  • Following Google's moves from last year is no way to catch them.
  • How about marketing yourself on your key properties.
  • Invest in Wikia search and share technology with them to attack Google from multiple fronts. Google engineers have openly admitted to frequently hand editing the search results. Now that search is back to being about people tell the USER that it is their web and THEY own it.
  • What if you assumed you already lost the search battle and decided to counter Google by being open about search, and being actively involved with the webmaster community? What is the worse that can happen? People start talking about you, trying your product, giving you feedback to improve your product, talk about you, and you gain marketshare. Oh no!
Published: October 16, 2007 by Aaron Wall in yahoo

Comments

billse
October 16, 2007 - 2:26pm

I read the post at seoroundtable, but for me, the 'link:' results were the same across the board. They were traditionally inaccurate in other ways though (but that's to be expected, unfortunately).

Totally agree with your post. It's really annoying that there's such a wall between the SE's and the webmasters that they make their $$$ from.

hugoguzman
October 16, 2007 - 3:10pm

Thanks for indirectly citing me and my colleague Tristan (the original thread was found on WebmasterWorld, and arose from an internal conversation here at DigitalGrit).

I don't think that this is the same as what Google is doing. For starters, they do allow anyone and everyone to access the more robust data.

All you have to do is register and/or login.

October 16, 2007 - 4:42pm

Hi Hugo
Glad to cite you. Did not mean to do it indirectly of course. I just tried posting about a lot of things before rushing off to an event.

And the problem with the statement "all you have to do is register and/or login" is that over time this move hints that you need to be authenticated for that site, etc. It hints at the motion of moving toward spying on and distrusting webmasters to guide them through fear vs creating a network that inspires creative thinking and value creation.

If you read about how economists aim to encourage economic growth one of the core fundamental principals is to discourage fear in order to set up an environment that encourages investment.

JoeSix
October 16, 2007 - 9:50pm

Hey Gang, Check out this help-wanted listing I saw today on the Hotjobs board:
****
How Big Can You Think?
Job Description

Yahoo! News & Info is looking for a product manager to drive the SEO efforts for its News, Sports, Finance, Lifestyles, Teachers and other related properties.
Requirements

Expert knowledge of the SEO trends and techniques along with the ability to manage a small team.
Work with product managers, designers, editors and engineers throughout the entire lifecycle of building websites to produce the SEO strategy and provide SEO guidance.
Responsible for analyzing reports in order to tweak existing pages to improve SEO results.
Develop Link strategies with off network sites.
Work with editors and content producers to insure articles are being written and linked to in the optimal ways.
Document SEO guidelines and provide internal training to organizations to keep the latest SEO techniques top of mind.
*****
Now maybe I'm missing something but if Yahoo is asking for an outsider to provide SEO strategy and guidance to them (Google copycat advice maybe?) then how confused are these people. Strange.

October 17, 2007 - 3:36am

Hi JoeSix
I think it is a good idea for them to hunt for who they want and spend big rather than place a public ad like that.

They have the scale needed to afford just about anyone who wants a job.

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