Yahoo Calls Out Spammers In SERPS

[Discovery]

Nice! However it opens up a number of questions.


How do they determine who, how and why a company gets red flagged?

What recourse do these companies have?


Will they do the same for companies running PPC ads?


Why dont they apply the same logic to their Content network and show the partners who are "on the edge"?

Or do they just attack the free listings to increase PPC listings.



The pop up shows this is a relationship between Yahoo and Mcafee



You can review McCafees site where they outline their findings on a company.

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/debtxs.com?aff_id=661

Pay special attention to the relationship graphic, showing green sites and red sites that they are associated with.

Seems that it does matter who you associate with..Your associations have come home.. to roost.


Goodness.. there is MORE.
Check out their "assassin" rating
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/debtxs.com/email

Seems these Yahoo and Mcafee have a practice of filling out forms and testing to see if the company is a spammer. Are they also clicking on ads to do this? Does Yahoo! charge advertisers or filter out the clicks?


Does McAfee have any participation in the content network.. directly or indirectly through partnerships where the YPN could be benefiting financially from this activity? In other words where is McCafee finding the sites to review.
Consumer reports, SERPS, Ads?


My Oh My

Discovery

[AussieWebmaster]

Great analysis mate... and the questions raised are good ones....

[cryptblade]

I noticed these things on my home computer but that's because i have Mcafee running. This is in the direct SERPS. Wow. Interesting.

...makes me ponder about search engines more. so...universal search will include these kinds of things as it grows???

[SEMiAM]

This has actually happened to my company. Search Yahoo for "Clearwire", and we are red flagged. Dont have any answers as of yet, but we are in the process of working with them to get this fixed (hopefully). If something doesnt change soon, they will definitely be hearing from our legal team...

We are a well-known ISP, and just had a HUGE financial announcement earlier in the week, so this is causing some serious headaches, to say the least. The funny thing is, we do not send any sort of spam and screen all of our outbound e-mail campaigns very carefully and have all necessary opt-out options, etc... Im sure we are not the only ones, but this may come back to bite yahoo in their rear-ends. Anyone else having this prob?

[beu]

My question is, how does email relate to search? If the don't why include email stats in search results?

[sitetruth]

McAfee has been doing this for a while under the SiteAdvisor label.
The only new thing is that it's now tied to Yahoo search results.

SiteAdvisor was originally just a virus scan of site downloads, and that's still their main business. Then they added a honeypot system to find out who spams. They have a little manual input from their own people, presumably as a customer service function. Inevitably, they have a "social networking" type user complaint system.

They have a space for site "contact information" in their reports, but it's always blank for every site I tried, even for sites like "ibm.com", "yahoo.com", and "mcafee.com" itself. So they haven't progressed to looking at the business behind the web site. (We're into that, of course.)

One problem with a Yahoo/McAfee linkup is that the goals of an ad-driven search engine business are somewhat incompatible with those of a customer-driven security tool business. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I've written about the "bottom feeder" issue before. It's a real question whether an ad-supported search engine can afford to filter out the "bottom feeders".

[Marcia]

SiteAdvisor doesn't report on SEO/search spam - how would they know? Or is that something new they started?

My impression has always been that it's email spam and/or adware/spyware that are the issues they deal with.

[sitetruth]

Originally Posted by Marcia

SiteAdvisor doesn't report on SEO/search spam - how would they know? Or is that something new they started?

My impression has always been that it's email spam and/or adware/spyware that are the issues they deal with.

That's what I thought, too. But when I saw "Contact information", it looked like they were perhaps going in the direction Google did with DomainTools.

That's a promising direction. DomainTools tracks domains registered to the same registrant. Such blocks of domains might be treated as a single domain for link-weighting purposes.

[Chris Boggs]

Originally Posted by beu

My question is, how does email relate to search? If the don't why include email stats in search results?

I think this is actually a cool idea. You are right that email has nothing to do with search, but if a site is known to be a spammer, why not let your searchers (community) know about it, in order to provide them better service. IMO this has way more to do with user experience than wiht search results. I would think if it had anything to do with search, then Yahoo could automatically ding the offending site in the algo, and it wouldn't show up as high in the serps, no?

Great topic Discovery!

[beu]

I think this is actually a cool idea. You are right that email has nothing to do with search, but if a site is known to be a spammer, why not let your searchers (community) know about it, in order to provide them better service.

Yes, I've been thinking about this and do see the point. Seems like the modus operandi of a spammer remains the same no matter the medium.

At the same time, McAfee opted in to receive email by providing their email address. In my opinion when you opt in for email and then are sent what you requested it's not spam. Perhaps a little refinement is in order in terms of the jargon used?

Also noticed the "clearwire" site goes from first position to 5th based on the top 2 settings:
http://search.yahoo.com/preferences/...0439348&fr=yfp

[Marcia]

It's my perception that the most useful (and justifiable) reason for the "outing" of sites is to protect users from malware, driveby adware downloads that can literally wreck their systems. It's very scary to click on a URL in a search result and experience having something immediately try to download.

What's interesting where spam is concerned, is to see how SiteAdvisor charts out relationships among sites in the CPA space, where there's so little transparency with regard to perpetrators of email spam and fraudulent "offers."

[AussieWebmaster]

The biog problem with this is they may have a problem and show sites as bad that just have a code error on the page... but you get branded as malware etc... hard coming back from