Caydel’s SEO Blog

Who would have guessed that one of the best ways to spam Yahoo would have been spamming Google?

Earlier today, Barry Schwartz posted on Search Engine Roundtable about the phenomena where Google is ranking well in the Yahoo UK SERPS for the phrase “Buy Viagra”. Sure enough, when I checked the results for myself, in the Yahoo UK SERPS, for ‘Buy Viagra’!

A little deeper research into the matter indicated quickly where the source of this is quickly apparent. Perform a quick search on Yahoo for the phrase ‘buy viagra’ while constraining the search to the Google.com domain.

The first thing you will probably notice about the 37 SERPS returned is that there are a bunch of pages written up in full of pill-spam. These notebook pages are full of non-nofollowed links pointing to further spam sites.

This is extremely ironic, considering how Google pushes the NOFOLLOW tag to be used for user-generated content. Perhaps they should look at what they are allowing people to post on their domain?

Examples:

Secondly, there are a number of attempts to gain links through Google redirects, which are indexed by Yahoo!. This generates more non-nofollowed links on the Google.com domain. Again, ironic lack of NOFOLLOW tags on Google’s part…

Examples:

Lastly, there are various other pages linked in there, such as the Zeitgeist, a CSE for viagra purchases, and a link to Google trends.

Now, I highly doubt that there are thousands of sites out there linking to Google with the anchor text ‘buy viagra’. As a result, I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that the main thing propelling Google near the top of the ‘buy viagra’ SERPS in Yahoo would be these keywords on Google’s sites.

Building off of this, I would suggest that Yahoo places an unbelievably high value on the Google.com domain. Since the fact that those keywords only appear on 37 seperate pages on the Google domain was enough to push Google.com quite high in the Yahoo.com SERPS, I suspect that if one was to load as many pages on the Google.com domain (thinking of Google Base and Google Notebook, in particular), it would be possible without too much effort to rank for competitive terms in Yahoo.

I await your thoughts on the matter!

** Hat Tip to David Naylor

Yesterday, I read an interesting post by Jeremey Zawodny in which he calls out Google for blatantly stealing Yahoo’s template for the IE7 download page and using it for their own, after changing a few branding marks.

Late last night/early this morning Matt Cutts posted an (un)official response to Jeremy’s accusation, apologizing to the Yahoo UI designer whose template was stolen:

I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him. That would mean that the Yahoo! page was used as a template for Google’s IE7 promo page. I can’t say why someone at Google would decide to do that, but to the Yahoo! UI designer whose page was copied: my apologies. In my personal opinion, it sucks when someone else copies a page layout without attribution.

Matt quickly followed this up with a few comments and pictures pointing out how he imagines Google can sympathize with the designer seeing as how every move Google has made with regards to the design and formatting of their PPC ads was quickly copied by Yahoo (in addition to other PPC companies, I’m sure).

At the very end of his post, Matt offered this challenge:

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already , but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

This puts Yahoo in an interesting position - step up and admit that many of the ‘innovations’ they have applied to their PPC system were merely take from Google, or else sit down, pretend they didn’t see it, and drop the whole copying issue.

Good stuff - I love seeing point/counterpoint happen like that.

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