Yahoo Search and ATT

How many others are impacted?

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Are others here having trouble with the Yahoo handling of ATT url's?

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Maybe more details will help.

This is happening with a lot of ATT addresses but also is becoming a problem on other similar services.

For years, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others have indexed the "real" addresses at

home.att.net/~widgets/

members.cox.net/widgets/

home.earthlink.net/~widgets/

and so forth.

Yahoo has now developed a bug where they are finding and indexing addresses which they appear to think are duplicates.

ATT and Cox say that it is a problem at Yahoo and Yahoo has been totally silent about it for two or three months.

The addresses they are including now look like this:

widgets.home.att.net/

widgets.cox.net/

widgets.earthlink.net/

Since those are not the addresses which have been used for the past 6-10 years, they do not rank very well.

Feedback forms and e-mail to Yahoo get no response.

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Here is another one which just showed up in the Yahoo results:

home.worldnet.att.net/~widgets/

This is getting downright bizarre.

Yahoo is now finding

widgets.home.att.net/

home.att.net/~widgets/

and

home.worldnet.att.net/~widgets/

which are all the same page which in the past has always been resolved properly as

home.att.net/~widgets/

until a couple of months ago.

We now see the following urls which all resolve to the same address yet Yahoo considers them to be distinct duplicate content addresses.

home.worldnet.att.net/~widgets/
widgets.home.att.net/
widgets.home.worldnet.att.net/
home.att.net/~widgets/
home.worldnet.att.net/~widgets/index.html
widgets.home.att.net/index.html
widgets.home.worldnet.att.net/index.html
home.att.net/~widgets/index.html

[edit - un"livened" addresses]

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Here is another problem in the Yahoo results.

On virtual hosting services I have been noticing this more and more.

It is probaably a result of the same bug they are having problems with above.

Instead of finding and displaying the actual domain name of a page, the Yahoo Search results are displaying the name of the host and the ~[unix_directory] address.

So for example, a Widgeter in our town has a site which is

www.widgets.com

and it is hosted on a server called server23abc.com

Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves and everyone else shows the site as being on www.widgets.com but Yahoo shows the site as being on:

server23abc.com/~widgetsc/

Is anyone else seeing this and is there a fix we can do or is this another sign of problems at the YahooPlex?