Efficacy of Filing a Yahoo Spam Report

Is it for Stress Relief, Like Pressing the Walk Button at a Crosswalk?

[jaffstar]

I noticed a site spamming like crazy which is #1 in the Yahoo SERPS. They are using redirects, hidden text, keyword stuffing to name a few.

I filed a Spam Report with Yahoo a couple of months ago. It appears that the my cries went unanswered.

What's the point in having a spam report if they are not going to follow through?

[mark1615]

No point - don't waste the time.

[bakedjake]

What's the point in having a spam report if they are not going to follow through?

If I was a search engine, I'd have a spam reporting feature to see who was paying attention to which categories, probably because they're also optimizing in those categories.

[jaffstar]

The moral of the story....spam like crazy with yahoo. I was wondering if they really care if someone is spamming. They probably have bigger fish to fry.

[bakedjake]

Of course they care. Relevancy is key to their engine.

What they may not care about is people ratting out their competition. I dunno.

[jaffstar]

Relevancy is key to their engine.

True, click on a site and it redirects to another site, thats relevancy for you :)

[mark1615]

The problem with the snitch buttons is that the only people who do it are competitors doing it for competitive advantage. If they really paid attention to it, everybody would be reporting everybody else.

[randle]

I think the functionality of it is more data collection than anything. The optimal answer to eliminating the undesirables is through whatever algorithm they have, not through manual efforts. Make a change, and then see if the spam reporting goes down, or up.

You can build a search engine, but the real trick will always be keeping out the bad element, that’s what separates the real from the pretenders. Unfortunately right now from a spam perspective, Yahoo is a pretender.