The post ends with this up-in-arms statement:
I don’t believe in spam reports and I don’t believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the “quality guidelines”, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.Those are words to rally behind, right? I mean, what SEO wouldn't get angry upon seeing Yahoo! hypocritically not practice what they preach, i.e., Search Content Quality Guideline #8: "[Thou Shalt Not Have] Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees"? No fair! No fair!
But wait, here's what Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo! Media Group, had to say on her Yahoo! 360 page:
Although most folks here are very SEO-savvy, every once in a while we'll find a new engineer who might ask about adding lots of keywords or I get an email asking what if we put text the same color as the background (as if it were a brand new idea never heard of before) because I suggested the text be there and they don't really want to change the layout, or a partner who quietly decided to do things their own way.Laura is...right. As she stated in her post, "There are dozens of groups within Yahoo who manage hundreds of products and properties that maintain some of the largest, most trafficked sites on the internet consisting of millions of pages and gobs of new content being pushed out all day long every day."
Everyone knows that Yahoo! is a huge corporation. They must have tons of department divisions, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that *GASP* not every single Yahoo! employee is SEO-savvy. We all know that programming a site and programming an SEO-friendly (not to mention white-hat ethical) site can be entirely different altogether (hell, look at SEOmoz's site--we often enough don't practice what we preach). Any SEO who pokes around Yahoo! and their various portals can see that their pages aren't perfectly optimized. For instance, take a look at this Yahoo! Sports article URL:
https://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=jc-ownersmeetings052307&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
It's pretty ugly, chock-full of parameters, and difficult to deduce just by looking at it what the article's actually about.
What about how when I click on the "Tech" link from the home page, I'm taken to tech.yahoo.com/fp, even though tech.yahoo.com also resolves? Or how the "Dads and Grads" section on Yahoo! Tech has the same title tag as Yahoo! Tech's home page? Or how the title tag for "Tech Shows" is "Slingin' Sports to a Lonhorn Fan : Hook Me Up : Yahoo! Tech"?
I could go on, but you get the point. Many of Yahoo!'s own pages aren't sufficiently optimized, so why is it a shock to see that some engineer or programmer cloaked a page? Call me gullible, optimistic, high on "let's give them the benefit of the doubt," etc., but I believe Laura, I'm quick to forgive, and I don't think it's that big a deal. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at Yahoo! thought he was being clever by using cloaking to try and get Yahoo! ranked well for "used cars," and the SEO teams weren't immediately aware of it. As you can see, Laura acted quickly and addressed the "scandal" within a day (how's that for reputation management?), her explanation made perfect sense, and I'm sure whoever was responsible for the hiccup was educated on the wily ways of cloaking.
Even search engines make mistakes, so let's put away the torches for now.
I agree with you about putting away the torches, Rebecca. Y is a huge corporation & it has to be tough to control all of the various components of its content portal. The fact that Laura remedied this in a day indeed deserves kudos.
BUT, what about the other thousands of big-company sites whose smaller subsections practice this "run-of-the-mill" cloaking without the top-level SEOs knowing about it? Doesn't it often take them months to get pages un-banned? At the very least, it seems to be a bit of a double standard...
Wouldn't it be nice to see Yahoo (and the other engines--I am not trying to single them out by any means) be equally responsive to spam/cloak/redirect corrections made by non-Yahoo-properties? Too bad Laura doesn't oversee this too, she'd probably do a kick-ass job at it!
Great point, David. I do wish the search engines would be more responsive to situations where a company was found guilty of cloaking and rectified their ways, only to have to wait forever to get let out of the penalty box. If only they were as forgiving as I am. :P
Yeah, seems like there is a lot of angst among the SEO community right now what with G's interface changes/personalized search, Digg, and now this story. Maybe some of that has led to the more aggressive calls for removal of Y keys from everuone's keuboard.
They may just be swamped with the number of requests to "cut me some slack, I'll be good.." If they had really effective software solutions for detecting cloaking and whatnot, they could afford to be more responsive. I'm picturing a form where you furnish the URL of the cleaned up page, and upon submission you quickly get pardoned for your sins. But if the software isn't up to that, then it probably requires human (aka Expensive) intervention. Maybe not, I'm really just guessing.
Nice roundup of the recent cloaking posts surrounding Yahoo Rebecca. I wasn't aware that they had responded to the article by agerhart. Her response does make sense and I can't imagine that they have enough resources and continuing education programs to get all their employees up to speed their first week.
As users of all levels and educational skill sets gather in a work environment it can be hard to make everything "flow" with each of their strengths and weaknesses. I am sure it's the same with other comparable companies and if we dug deep enough we could probably find more examples of hipocritical practices within the other search intities.
I for one am with you, live and let live. Hopefully they invest in some training programs for certain employee groups to help combat non-savy techs from making these kind of mistakes.
Training programs would be a good idea. I can easily understand a communication breakdown in such a large company like Yahoo!--hell, it happens all the time here at SEOmoz, and we've only got seven employees.
Love the title of this post! lol
Haha, thanks. I was pretty proud of that one. :D
"Even search engines make mistakes, so let's put away the torches for now."
Or maybe ban them, wait for them to submit a reinclusion request, and then put the torches away...
I don't see anything wrong with cloacking but that is just me... It certanly isn't fair what Yahoo did but can we compare average webmaster with Yahoo? I mean, big players always get away with "crimes"...
p.l.u.r.
If only all sites - big corporations, small blogs, whatever - had equal treatment when it comes to making SEM (search engine mistakes).
I can see the point of one employee making a mistake due to lack of experience, but what about that new business who's going to get pushed down the slopes of the search engine mountain because they had no idea what they were doign?
Shouldn't everybody be given the opportunity to fix their ways, rather than punished?
Then again, I'm new to this whole "scene," so I'm probably just rambling.
Either way, great post.
Nice post Rebecca. I would not let Yahoo! off the hook that easily though. This incidence should have Yahoo! teaches a lesson. Every company has an image, self created or adopted and reputation. Yahoo! stand for Internet search among some other things. Yahoo! as a company represents something, values, allegiance, most call it Mission and Vision.
Things that are important to protect these values and reputation should be taught to every single employee that it will become second nature and ensures that the person will be able to represent Yahoo! if doing something as representative of Yahoo! as a company (and not personal and in the spare time).
For example CircuitCity playing an pirated video for demo purposes in a physical store location, is just something wrong and hurts the company and what it represents. It was probably not illegal and nobody would have cared about it, if it would have happened at lets say a Bally's fitness studio location.
The webmaster guidelines and other similar and fundamental guides should be part of every new Yahoo! employee's YEG (Yahoo! Employee Guide).
It least they responded quickly, which is good. Their paid search and affiliate management team is not as quick and the pages would still be cloaked.
Im glad Jane mentioned the BMW issue from 2006, as its exactly what I thought of when it was mentioned about other companies having quick turnaround on getting their corrected content back into the SERPs..
In addition what about Big Mouth Media? The London SEO company who caught caught red handed and were promptly dispatched, only to have their site back and ranking as soon as it was corrected? Seems its not just the massive corporations.. but I guess it helps..
I do have to agree that with such big companies one dept doesnt necessarily know what Joe Bloggs in Autos is doing at any given time.. and it strongly reiterates (for me) that just cause -I- know something and it is second nature to me, doesnt mean that everyone else does.
Just cause certain SEO practises immediately ring alarm bells in my mind, doesnt mean that its common knowledge.. this is something I have to remind myself all the time when I meet new clients.
Hopefully it's a sign that they are moving towards alerting you very quickly (algorithmically) when you do something wrong - as a lot of guideline breaches are accidental - not everyone can know the guidelines as well as feedthebot - but also 'unbanning' you quickly when you do sort out the problem.
I'd like to see that for everyone - not just the big guys (and search engines!).
I can understand some hiccups here and there in a Yahoo-sized company, but is doesn't excuse the action. What if I cut the line at the local bakery, piss everyone off, say "oopsie," then move to the back of the line AFTER I've already purchased my doughnut? I still get my doughnut that day, and everyone else is still pissed.
And tomorrow, I'm going to kick the guy who decides to cut in front of me in the leg...
You're really angry about that donut, aren't you?
I don't even like doughnuts! I'm just trying to say that you can't be a hypocrite at that level. ALL of their gazillion employees, the webmasters to the bagel guy (doughnut guy?), should be aware of company policy. Especially when you are enforcing those policies upon others...
I don't think Rebecca is excusing the cloaking, nothing excuses cloaking. She's just saying that in the 13,000 employee web death star that is Yahoo!, this will happen from time to time and it isn't a big deal.
Exactly. Thanks Jeff!
Fluxx,
That is where a lot of people will disagree with you.
If this happened within at WSJ.com I would understand. They may not employ someone savvy to SEO tactics or the Search Engine's guidelines. Here's the important part. They aren't a search engine adn they're not enforcing rules for everyone to follow. Yahoo is and does which is hypocrtical in this case.
As we said above, mistakes happen. And that is why open communication is key to they can be corrected and everyone can move forward. Historically this has been a problem with Yahoo.
Maybe that's why they're not the leading search engine in the U.S...time for Yahoo! to start getting their shit together, perhaps?
Jeff, I think you're going a little far there. Nothing's inherently wrong with cloaking, nothing's even that morally reprehensible about spamming the search engines. It's not a smart strategy in the long term, IMO, but that doesn't mean we should be condemning it like they just committed a crime.
I don't see why anyone is surprised. Don't all the search engines penalize sites for selling links or buying links? I mean it's okay for them to do it but if anyone else wants to do it, it's not okay. Just because they choose to put their links in javascript shouldn't matter. Your choice of technology and business model should be up to you. They didn't invent the internet but they sure love to police it and make up the rules.We all need to get used to the fact that they run the show and we have to live with it. Unless there is some kind of non-profit, open source search engine developed, we have to play by their rules. The real question is whether the search results at Yahoo were being penalized for the cloaked pages.By the way. The "its' a big company" excuse is lame. What if this were an issue which lead to an accident in a large manufacturing company? "oh sorry. It's a big company. Not everyone knows how to run the equipment."It's called training. How about they teach people if they don't know what cloaking is?
Well, for me, the difference between Yahoo and a manufacturing plant is that Yahoo's "product" isn't going to cause any physical harm to anyone by 'malfunctioning.'
But you're right, someone somewhere along the assembly line probably should have reviewed those pages before they were posted, especially on such an important property as Autos.
I'm probably just in a bad mood because Yahoo just dropped all my pages by 5 or more spots today. Nice to hear that they're cloaking on top of it. I know they're not causing anyone harm per say but I just never liked the big company cop out.
I'm not really using it as an excuse, nick, just a reminder to people who were shocked and thought it was unfair for something like that to happen at Yahoo!.
VW.com just got caught with hidden text. Kudos to these 2 corporations for fixing their errors the same day. I doubt they will repeat the mistake.
I personally didn't light any torches. Simply pointing out shady doings by one of the companies that shouldn't be doing them. But, a level of accountability would be nice.
>>>>BUT, what about the other thousands of big-company sites whose smaller subsections practice this "run-of-the-mill" cloaking without the top-level SEOs knowing about it? Doesn't it often take them months to get pages un-banned? At the very least, it seems to be a bit of a double standard...
I think that is a large part of the problem. There are countless threads at WmW where users complain about the lack of communication regarding their site's status with emails going unanswered. Who knows whether they deserve it or not, but that's irrelevant.
If the "it's a mistake, we'll fix it our SE status shouldn't change" logic applies to Yahoo then it should also apply to other site owners.
>>>The "its' a big company" excuse is lame.
Agreed.
Agerhart, maybe this could be a bit of a humbling experience for Yahoo! Getting caught cloaking and hearing the backlash and accusations of being hypocritical could be a good thing for them, in that perhaps they might re-assess their poor communication with webmasters regarding cloaking.
(I somehow doubt it, but one can hope...)
Oh, and I'm in no means trashing or discounting your post about the whole matter. I think it's great, and kudos to you for uncovering their cloaking in the first place. Way to sleuth, good sir.
Thanks Rebecca!
The User Agent Switcher plugin is a handy little tool ;)
I guess this is a case of life not being fair. Yahoo! probably didn't intend to violate their own rules on purpose; if some other company had done this, they very well could have been banned. Yahoo! won't ban itself and even if they theoretically did penalize themselves, they'd be unbanned very quickly!
However, there are numous examples of big, influential companies having their bans lifted quickly (I believe BMW.de was an example of this in 2006). In some ways, this as unfair as Yahoo! or another strong domain ranking ahead of a well-written, patiently-researched, passionately-cared-for PageRank 1 blog for certain keywords. It's as unfair as talented musicians making no money and talentless singers making millions.
Good job calling them out, Agerhart, however.... they deserve to be told about their sins, even if it doesn't make the net any more fair.
True...the fact of the matter is that the playing field is not level and we just do our best to climb our way to the top.
I'd lump "musicians who get parts in movies" into that category, which drives me crazy. Hey, I'm Fergie! I get to be in a movie because I sell lots of albums!
Argghh.
Fergie is the Yahoo of entertainment? Poor, poor Yahoo.
Great call Jane!