Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

It wasn’t my intention, when I wrote about how Google wouldn’t index one of my sites to make it to the #1 keyword for “Google Sucks” but it happened anyway. That’s a story for another day–right now my gripe is with infamous search engine Yahoo, which doesn’t index any of my sites at all!

Try searching for name, Elliott Back on Yahoo and you get absolutely nothing:

I tried adding my feed to Yahoo Site Explorer but it’s been 50 minutes and it hasn’t been indexed yet. I’m going to contact Webmaster Support and see what comes. My suspicion is that this is a side-effect from the rapid adoption by others of WP Autoblog, which links back to me, one of the reasons I stopped distributing it.

Update: I submitted my feed at 05/17/2007 14:18:01 and it was processed on 05/17/2007 14:26:18. Apparently it took a long time to get reported as processed, but the processing itself happened within 10 minutes.

Update 2: Well so far nothing. If any Yahoo people stop by, drop me a note or give me a call and we can get this sorted out.

Update 3: I emailed a friendly Yahoo employee who might be able to help, and also signed up for their paid search inclusion, “search submit basic,” which hopefully can nudge the site back into the index. Although, I don’t feel right paying for being indexed, it feels too black hat.

Update 4: I got the following email back from Yahoo:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines located at: help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Below are some answers to common questions regarding this issue:

Q: What are some of the common reasons that a site may violate Yahoo!’s Content Policy Guidelines?

A: Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines (link above) outline what we are and are not looking for in pages that we index. Listed below are some of the more common reasons that a site may violate these guidelines:

- Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site)
- Massive domain interlinking- Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content
- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka “link farms”)
- Hidden text
- Excessive keyword repetition

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the SiteMatch inclusion program?

A: All pages submitted to SiteMatch are editorially reviewed. If a site has a judgment against it, it is likely to be rejected by the SiteMatch program.

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the Yahoo! Express directory inclusion program?

A: Yes, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search Index are different systems. Inclusion or exclusion from one does not affect the other.

Q: How can I have my site re-reviewed?

A: Please review our content quality guidelines to make sure that your site meets all of them. When you feel the site is ready, please complete the form located at: add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview requesting a re-review of your site. You may wish to include an explanation of unique features on your site, or details of changes to your site’s content that may assist our editors in their evaluation.

Please allow several weeks for the review process, YST indexing, and a complete refresh of the database before checking search.yahoo.com to see if your site is listed in the Yahoo!Search Index. We do not offer specifics detailing how an individual site is not in compliance with our guidelines, but we will review your site individually. You will not be
receiving further notification regarding your request for a second review, and we are not able to offer the option of another review.

Thank you for taking the time to make the Yahoo! Search Index better.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Evan

Yahoo! Customer Care
www.yahoo.com/

Uh, this email contains no information that could help me understand why I’m banned from Yahoo, or how to correct that ban. Thanks for the … wasted bits in cyberspace!

iBegin source does local search, sure. If I look for laundry service in East Elmhurst I get a veritable list of results, including, in #1 position, the actual location of the nearest laundromat:

That’s enough to convince me that iBegin’s data is high-quality, since it’s the actual data-selling from which they want to make money. Their edge is selling clean, structured, and updated business-information data. You can browse it all online, so you know exactly what you’re getting. For $1000 a state, or $40000 for all the US, they’ll sell you 10,820,477 unique business listings, enriched by:

• Deduplication, sorting, and filtering
• Geocoding and nearest intersection
• Automatic purchasing
• Free daily, weekly, and monthly updates
• Simple delimited data format

If you were looking to start a web business with this kind of data, iBegin source would be a great place to start. They have a unique edge on others in this market because their data is social data. Anyone viewing an entry can also update it, adding value to the content for all other users:

This might be the first commercial wikipedia-like editing system I’ve seen that could succeed, because everyone wins when the data is updated. Customers who submit a listing or automate posting new items increase their own database, iBegin’s database, and thanks to free updates, help out the entire community.

I read 15 things iBegin Source does better on a blog the other day so I was pleasantly surprised when this showed up on ReviewMe, because it’s an interesting idea. Anything build around sharing data cheaply (well, for that market anyway) is a great idea.

If you search Google for the phrase “miserable failure” you won’t find Bush in the top result anymore:

Google has turned over new algorithms that know how to handle Googlebombing:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs).

Wikipedia is fast on the scene, but only noting that:

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

There’s a bit of an edit war going on to try and decide what this means. How do you detect an intentional Google bomb from simply a newly popular site? This could have an accidental impact on a lot of smaller websites.