Is this Spam? Yahoo fooled?

[dollshouse]

The timid world of online dolls' house sales is becoming a tad cut-throat!

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1-&p=dolls+house+kits

The first result is the one in question...
The artifical link 'network' hidden in the <no frames> tags looks pretty blatent to me, but I can't understand why Yahoo would fall for something so obvious

Have I got my facts correct?

Thanks and sorry for the boring post

Paul

[dannysullivan]

Yahoo is the best authority about what it considers spam, so you should report this or other pages you suspect would be spam there, via this Report Search Spam (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-06.html) page.

I don't have the time to do an in-depth look at this site, but I did take a quick look and will comment on what may help people generally.

That page (call it A) appears to simply show the same content as the home page of another site (call this B). But the pages themselves are actually different. In particular, page A displays the content of page B by framing page B.

Why do this? There's no particular reason other than likely to generate search engine traffic. Page A also makes use of material placed in the noframes area to insert copy I imagine it hopes will help it do well for doll house related terms.

If the same company is running both pages, then it might be violating these Yahoo guidelines (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html):


Pages dedicated to redirecting the user to another page
The use of text that is hidden from the user
Pages built primarily for search engines


Yahoo also has this guideline:


Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity


I don't know that page in question is promoting a "network" of sites. There are a lot of links, but they seem to point back to the same site. There are different domain names used, but it's common that some web sites may be found via different domain names.

For example, searchenginewatch.com, sewatch.com, searchenginewatch.internet.com all lead to the same site. One is the domain name we promote, one a shortcut way to reach the site and the last an option that all sites in the internet.com network use. While there are at least three different domain names, they all point to the same single site. If we set up three different sites, then we might be in a search engine spam situation.

It is clear that there's no apparently reason to have all those links regardless of whether the domain names lead to the same site or not. Given this, I think the better guideline it might violate is this:


Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking

[dollshouse]

thank you Danny

I've already reported it to Yahoo - are they likely to manually intervene if they consider this a violation? Or do they take Googleesque long-term approach and try to 'fix' their alogorithm?

Re: Domains - I had always thought that best practice on this was to 301 redirect each domain to a single URL - I note that the SEW domains don't do this - is there a particular reason for this? have I misunderstood something somewhere?

[dannysullivan]

You only need to redirect if you are pointing from one web site to another -- or from the former location of a particular web page to another web page.

At SEW, the domains all resolve to the same place. In other words, they were never operated as separate web sites. We have one web site. You can get to it thorugh a number of different domains, but it remains the same site.

Consider it like this:

Redirection
Domain Name A/Site A ------redirect-------> Domain Name B/Site B

Resolution
Domain Name A
Domain Name B ---all resolve to---> same web site.

[NFFC]

>Have I got my facts correct?

Apart from the small point of missing rule #1 in the SEO's handbook, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

How many TOS voilations do YOU have?

>You only need to redirect if you are pointing from one web site to another -- or from the former location of a particular web page to another web page.

I think that is at best playing with fire and at worst plain wrong. Make it easy for the SE's, show them which *one* domain name/site you want indexing.

[dollshouse]

Apart from the small point of missing rule #1 in the SEO's handbook, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

How many TOS voilations do YOU have?

Does our website really violate TOS's? Or are you just making a general point about what you think an SEO should and should not say or do?

What are we doing wrong? I'm not a deliberate spammer and if mistakes are being made I'll hold my hands up and correct the errors. I'd appreciate your input.

I'm not particularly bothered about casting aspertions on the website in question - I doubt very much if they realise what the 'marketing' company who set these doorways up has done. Yet.

[Nick W]

>>Or are you just making a general point about what you think an SEO should and should not say or do?

That sounds about right. You never know which fellow webmaster owns which site when you publicly draw attention to their site and their practices.

It's just bad form.

Nick

[dollshouse]

It's just bad form.

Ouch! Point taken, I won't do it again.

In my defence I honestly just wanted to hear, other, more experienced users opinions on this - very difficult to do without being specific.

Thanks for pointing this out

Paul