max_mm - 9:54 am on May 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

Max... i am listed fairly high in Yahoo also and still am. Are you saying that yahoo allows rss feeds from their search results?

Yes, they offer free feeds to every joe and thier dog.
Unfortunately, in most cases, those feeds are being used to create content for adsense scrappers and doorway pages.

Is this how so many sites got my links?

Yes, and there is nothing you can do about it except for maybe ditch your site, buy a new domain name and start from scratch hoping or blocking yahoo from finding your site. Because you can't trust google to accommodate for this issue, their engineers are fast becoming clueless and incompetent. Yahoo are beating them at their own game "relevant search result$". Google’s algo can’t find it’s way around the scrappers problem and it is affecting G serps big time. I can almost see the big smile on the faces of Y engineers as we speak.

Also how would they take part of my content? Could they get this from the feeds also? I have noticed that most of them have small extracts of my content thrown in with other content stolen from other websites.

Yes, the Y feeds provide your URL, page description and title. The webmasters in question just embed this feed into their static html pages and G scoops it up like there is no tomorrow.

How can we fix this? Surely Google and Yahoo has a moral right to do something about it.

Those scrappers bring google a lot of adsense/adwords $$, why would they?

Webmasters who have lost rank on G serps will probably start looking into using paid PPC (eg ADWORD$$), again why would they fix it (G that is)?

We are being unjustly punished for creating valuable content that both engines use to run their businesses.

You bet!, it is all about the money now. Google is turning the entire web into a massive junk yard full of scrappers due to the reason i listed above.

I am actually on the lookout for a good scrapper software as we speak. Hell, if i can't beat them then i might as well join them. There are bills to pay.