Yahoo Rips Adsense Ads

[Tom_99]

Yahoo's MyWeb beta is shocking. Basically you can save just about any web page to MyWeb. Then when you go to look at it, you will see the page you saved with all Adsense ads ripped out, and put at the very bottom.

How can this be legal? Is it because they call it a personal web? The problem is you can make your personal web public.

The absolute worst part of myweb is you as a webmaster cannot block it. There is no ip address to block Yahoo takes the page from your local pc, and the nocache metatag is not respected.

See for yourself at [myweb.search.yahoo.com...]

[edited by: Tom_99 at 8:29 am (utc) on April 28, 2005]

[crescenta]

I just tried it out. I saw what they did to my site. Hmm.

I don't so much have a problem with them putting their banner at the top (I didn't see any of their ads anywhere), but I do mind the Adsense ad being taken off.

[dauction]

Save all the pages you like (exact copies, not just links!)

exact copies?!

[Tom_99]

I have verified several times that 2 ads 4 blocks each: a 728x90 and a 120x600
has been reduced down to one two block ad that is not related to the saved page and is placed at the very bottom of the page.

How will this affect statistics among other things

[elfred]

I just tried with a page of mine. Basically, it looks like they are "getting" IFRAME contents and putting them at the end of the page shown.

[crescenta]

I don't see any ads at the bottom, and I've checked several times. Could it be a browser/OS thing? I'm on Mac OS X and Firefox.

[oddsod]

Creeps! (I'd use something stronger if it wasn't for the WW filter)

The ads are indeed at the bottom of the page even if you don't use IFrames. My SSI is pushed to the bottom as well.

Also, they seem to be stripping any Javascript you have on the page to prevent your site being shown in somebody else's frames.

Cheap trick, Yahoo! Now have the decency to tell us how we can block your users "saving" our pages. Or is it going to take some big boy taking you to court for IP violations before you do something?

[valeyard]

Could some clever person write a bit of Javascript to redirect the browser if a page is being viewed through MyWeb?

[ken_b]

I just tried with a page of mine. Basically, it looks like they are "getting" IFRAME contents and putting them at the end of the page shown.

Are they doing this to all I-frame content?

If so, that could mess up a lot more than just ads.

[Tim]

We are looking into the reported issue of Adwords not rendering within the cache correctly right now. We are still in BETA with the MyWeb product so there may be one or two issues like this we need to sort out before full launch. If there are other suggestions that you have for new functionality or improvements to the product please send them to me via forum mail or add the suggestions to this thread.

Thanks,
Tim

[walkman]

Tim,
how about a sort of opt-out (from saving) as some suggested? it may save you a lot of trouble with big publishers. It could be a Y! specific tag, robots or whatever. Some content might be time specific or webmasters simply don't want to have their content copied and shared this easily.

Personally, I don't care. The more my content is "copied" the better but to some this is bad

[edited by: walkman at 5:18 pm (utc) on April 28, 2005]

[robho]

one or two issues like this we need to sort out before full launch

Basically the way it handles iframes is broken.

I have a site with adsense wide skyscraper in the left column. With the saved site, that skyscraper starts after the end of the page, and has ads unrelated to the site.

With a site that has a leaderboard embedded in the page, it is replaced with a 468x60 banner after the page, again with unrelated ads.

It's not just Adsense, but all iframes. I have another site that has an Adsonar wide skyscraper on the left, followed by a few other links. Now the links start at the top of the page, with the Adsonar iframe overlaid on it, a real mess.

The name is also a poor choice. It's so easy to enter my.search.yahoo.com instead (and get Yahoo Malaysia).

[oddsod]

Tim, thanks for joining in. We look forward to Adsense displaying properly. The feature most webmasters here would probably want is an opt-in rather than an opt-out i.e. your users can't save our sites except with our prior consent. But seeing that this would make your service virtually useless webmasters would want a smarttag type opt-out... how can we stop your users from "saving" our pages?

I would also be interested in knowing why you don't allow sites to break out of your frame. Is that a bug you're working on fixing?

[edited by: oddsod at 5:19 pm (utc) on April 28, 2005]

[incrediBILL]

and has ads unrelated to the site.

Your AdSense ads will be unrelated and useless as AdSense is trying to serve up ads based on the page location in Yahoo My Web page which hasn't been crawled, not based on your original web page.

[walkman]

Bill The Incredible ;),
I used the no-cache argument to counter yours about how you have to agree first for your content to be "copied" (Opt-in vs Opt-out).

"That's why people band together in class actions, $100 each from a thousand webmasters might do it."

You don't need money. Lawyers will take this for free /a nice %, if you have a case, and Y! presumably pays when they settle or go to court.

[incrediBILL]

Here's some irony:

[docs.yahoo.com...]

Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same.

So just how does this new service ask users to respect our intellectual property rights?

Just goes to show you can't believe a word they say.

[jcoronella]

I think this is really cool stuff. I like how it annotates the SERPs. Very useful.

They are using javascript to stream out the page content, and it looks like they ran into some javascript problems, at least in terms of nested javascript. If you take a look at the javascript that they document.write out, it is the exact same as the page they cache. They are not moving any ads.

lawsuit

Man, you guys sure are quick with your pitchforks.

[Tim]

I think some people are misunderstanding how the product works:

1) When a user caches a copy it is just available to them.
2) When a user shares a folder with their saved stuff we provide a link to the live site not the cached copy. There is no republishing to other users going on.

This feature will enable users who like your site to tell others that they like your site and therefore send you more traffic..

[jomaxx]

I haven't signed up and tried it yet, but it doesn't seem any different from simply saving the same page to one's hard drive, which is also trivial.

[added] ...assuming that they fix the application to display web pages correctly.[/added]

[Tim]

Another Misunderstanding
The default in MyWeb is to send the user directly to the live site when you click on the title and a user has to click on the "my cached copy" link down below to go to your personal cached copy. Can people please try out the product rather than taking the misinformation in this thread as fact.
Thanks,
Tim

[edited by: Tim at 7:07 pm (utc) on April 28, 2005]

[m0nty]

Not that I'm on either Yahoo or G's side in this, but I haven't seen anyone address what I asked earlier about My Web being just like caching done by Yahoo, Google, or any other decent SE. Is the only difference the "opt in" issue of the anti-cache metatext, or is there some other difference I'm not seeing?

[walkman]

"Can people please try out the product rather than taking the misinformation in this thread as fact."

good point. as a paid Y! mail person I might try it one day, but will stop commenting on it till then ;)

[crescenta]

Try as I might, I cannot get Adsense to display on one of my own (cached) pages. So I "saved" another page (one that has another ad program, not Adsense) and it shows the ad--at the bottom of the page, instead of where I put it.

It also shows the graphics as "This graphic belongs to" pictures. I have hotlink protection on all my sites, so anyone who tries to access my graphics from somewhere else is served a graphic that tells them that the image is hotlinked. Well, that's what I get with my "saved" page. Lots of these graphics.

Edited to add: I "saved" another page. It was a sea of "this graphic belongs to" pictures. (I have a background image, so that was "hotlinked" as well.)

Well, okay. So anyone who saves any of my pages is going to get one ugly, unreadable, useless page. Hmmm.

[Brett_Tabke]

I deleted about 20 posts in this thread that were completely out of line for WebmasterWorld. Leave your flames and personal stuff at the server door.

They said they were checking it out. Please give them a chance to do that.

[BillyS]

Can people please try out the product rather than taking the misinformation in this thread as fact.

Tim is trying to work with us to make it a better product. It is a beta... Providing meaningful comment rather than threats of lawsuits make more sense. People were excited about the possibility of more traffic - something even Tim mentioned.

Don't scare the guy off, we need folks like him that can carry our message back!