Competitor Spamming Yahoo

How Likely They Will Get Booted for it?

[Essex_boy]

This is not what I believe to legit, a competitor for a semi competitive phrase (1500 a day) has used a black back ground with a dark colour to hide several paragraphs of utter nonsense.

All with the main search phrase in. guess what its top of the searches for taht phrase.

Is this common on Y? Can they get booted for it? If so how likly is this to happen?

[randle]

Our experience has been to see sites like that shoot to the top of the rankings, stay there for a week or so and then start slowly sinking down, eventually off the first page and into the second. I’m surprised that just hidden text is doing it as the current crop are mostly fueled by large quantities of key word text links, often hidden. Wave your cursor over the page and see if you can spot them, might be there.

Lots of this going on in Yahoo, but it does appear like they have some defenses against it. On another matter it looks as if MSN has none and is being overrun by this sort of thing as time goes on.

[brokenbricks]

The #1 site in my niche is doing the same, hiding keyword stuffed text with CSS.

This week I noticed Yahoo's reuslts changing back and forth for that term, showing 2 or 3 different indexes. And in 2 of them, that site is nowhere to be found, gone from #1 and apparently penalized or banned. Then sometimes they are still #1. Things haven't settled in yet...but I hope they are banned and that index stays the same.

[hp11]

I see it with all of the search engines, including G. In time, they will lose ranking due to their spammy techniques or by someone reporting them (which believe it or not doesn't always work).

[Liane]

I don't think Yahoo has any interest or means with which to deal with same or nearly identical coloured text and background.

A site in my industry has been at the top of the SERPS for years despite several reports. I simply don't think they care if the site is in any way relevat to the search phrase.

[jaffstar]

a competitor for a semi competitive phrase (1500 a day) has used a black back ground with a dark colour to hide several paragraphs of utter nonsense.

Are they using they owndomain.com or a freehhosting.com/theirsite?

I have seen a couple sites with zero PR/IBL doing this.

[Essex_boy]

No its their owndomain.com. Does this amtter then?

[Tim]

If you want to report spam to Yahoo you can send it to: reportsearchspamatyahoo-incdotcom
Thanks,
Tim

[larryhatch]

It shouldn't be rocket science to discover sites like this.

For dark print ( lets say TEXT="#010101" ) on a black background ( BGCOLOR="000000" )
Yahoo or Google could split this into the primary colors R/G/B = 00/00/00.
Subtracting these values from 01/01/01 yields plus or minus 1/1/1.
Adding the absolute (positive) sum of these yields a total "color difference" of three.
That and similarly small sums could trigger an alert in microseconds.

It should work for any colors, lemon-yellow against grapefruit-yellow for example.

I'd be awfully surprised if nobody thought of that. -Larry

[sem4u]

It shouldn't be rocket science to discover sites like this.

All those PHDs at Google and they can't even work it out...

In some areas Yahoo! seems to be doorway domain city...who wants to see the same site coming up for the same keywords?

[Pico_Train]

Yahoo are trying to do something about it. I posted about poor results in this forum under "Multiplicity of Sites" and I got a sticky from what I presume to be a Yahoo Search representative asking me about the particular search and the results.

The culprit and offending search have now beenm rectified.

It does help to send them an email about the problem. You will get a canned response but someone down the line will get your email and hopefully do something about it.

[jd01]

I sent a very detailed outline of about 6 sites that were cleverly strung together using a free site in the middle and all pointing to the main site... even sent the exact url of the pages that tied them all together. (They also have 3 of the sites listed in the directory...) It's been about 3 weeks... and no go.

So maybe they have a big back log, or only some get reviewed.

Justin

[iSeeker]

Dealing with abuse is a constant struggle so you have to commend Tim and his team at Yahoo for their efforts. When we report abuse to them we should remember that some instances of abuse are more serious than others and therefore take priority. The bigger the abuse, the more likelhood of them taking action.

I have been observing one webmaster who has found a loophole and is causing serious havoc by dominating most of the top positions for many profitable search terms using cloaking and deceptive redirects. I suspect that this is serious enough to warrant attention. I’ll keep monitoring the situation.

[RichTC]

I currently cant work out Y at all

On our widgets site we have a range of sectors, blue widgets, red widgets, yellow widgets etc, etc, etc.

red widgets is a major competitive keyword and we rank position 3 for "Types of red widget" for our home page.

Meanwhile we dont feature for "Types of blue widget" Types of Yellow widget" etc, etc yet these terms have much fewer results in the index and are mentioned exactly the same amount of times on the home page and have exactly the same amount of links to them from other sites as red widgets.

You would think all things being equal the other terms would rank exactly the same, if not better as their are fewer results?