I had lunch with Tim Mayer of Yahoo yesterday. I'd heard he was "looking for me," at PubCon one night in the hotel bar, and figured it was because we broke news on the SiteMatch product a little earlier than Yahoo would have liked. So I kind of avoided him after that :)

But he caught up with me in New York and we sat down for a "little chat."

Once we cleared the air we had an interesting half an hour of conversation ranging from blackhat seo techniques to the future of AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

In certain forums, he said, where veteran members discuss blackhat seo techniques freely, newer members use these techniques on their own sites and then get banned. I asked Tim about somehow warning webmasters that they're using blackhat techniques, thereby protecting those who inadvertently cross the line.

He said, "we do warn them. We ban them."

He pointed out first how difficult notifying offenders would be, given that webmasters often falsify their whois data. Secondly, he said that every blackhat technique has an arguably legitimate use, even cloaking. (Though 95% of the time he sees such techniques it's spam.)

Also, issuing warnings would notify optimizers where the "spam lines" are, meaning that if he told BobsTravelWorld.com that they have too many links on a page, Bob would be able to bring that link count to just under the maximum amount Yahoo allows. (Not that the number of links on the page is or isn't something Yahoo's bot uses to flag spam - just an example Tim used.)

Tim also mentioned that alltheweb and AltaVista could soon have their own distinct algorithms and indices. The results will still be relevant, he said, but different.

This reminded me of Greg Jarboe's "search as media" concept that rocked my world last December. The concept was obviously not new to Tim - he said Fast, one of the many search engines he's worked on, originally started as a search engine for women.

Though he didn't touch on timeline or any other specifics, he did make it clear that alltheweb and AltaVista will eventually have different results.

I think that's smart, especially in light of Bob Davis's remarks (Bob Davis sold Lycos for 12.5 billion in '99 and now funds companies through Highland Capital) in an earlier session that the future of search is in verticals. I'm excited to see how Yahoo positions their less prominent engines, and what search products they develop around them.

To show my appreciation to Tim for chatting with me (without pr around even), today is officially my all Yahoo search day. I'll let you know if I decide to change my homepage.

__________________
Garrett French
Editor, WebProNews.com
http://www.WebProNews.com

Garret,

Just wondering, what is the shift Yahoo! is planning on doing in April.

Bergy

Speaking of "somehow warning webmasters".... what in tarnation is that? Blackhat SEO techniques... Never heard of it, hope I don't wake up with it one morning, and hope it didn't spread to others.

Really. I am unaware of it. How do I find out more about these 007 techniques and how to make sure I'm not breaking the rules?

Blackhat SEO = spam

CBP

It seems that the word Spam is just plain over spammed and has to many "one size fits all" uses.

Search Engine Spam is something totally different.
1.> Hyper-theading hundreds of pages that Hyper-thead to hundreds of generated pages inside of an invisble layer hidden within the desired page, and all of the topics, body and links are tuned your targeted product.

2.> Pretending to be a search engine and relevent to the search subject, yet all pages eventually lead to your target.

3.> Content overload, beating the relevance requirement, the link requirement, the keyword to relevance requirement and so on then cross-linking similar pages.

That should give you a picture . . . . .

Can you tell me what the blackhat techniques are? Thanks.

__________________
Pick My Gift.Com - Gifts of Distinction for You and Your Home! http://www.pickmygift.com

Can you tell me what the blackhat techniques are?

Yes, "blackhat techniques" are underhanded and sneeky ways that are used to gain better position than a standard optimized page would be ranked.

The Blackhat's are the Bad Guys and they get busted and de-listed, blackhole and without warning either.

Not a good practice.

<G>

well..... thats what the search engines would like you to believe but if you look at the SERPs of almost any engine, you will find lots of topranking pages using techniques which could be considered black hat.

__________________
Mel Nelson
Expert SEO | Cheap used cars

Am a newbie to this forum (not to the seo-world, though ;-) - you would light up my day, if i could get some hints what this sentence means:

"This reminded me of Greg Jarboe's "search as media" concept that rocked my world last December. The concept was obviously not new to Tim - he said Fast, one of the many search engines he's worked on, originally started as a search engine for women."

Where can I find further information on Greg Jarboe's article / talk?
And is there more information on that FAST was developed as search engine for women. What implication had this gendering on the technology, design, output (less porn-sites?)???

Cheers,

reg

FAST was not created as a search engine for women. It was actually Looksmart that was originally targetted at Women. Garrett and I were eating lunch so it was hard for him to take notes I think.

Oops - thanks Tim.

Did targeting LookSmart for women affect the algorithm?

Was it originally a human edited index?

Interesting questions, reg.

Here's a link to where I wrote about Greg's search is media concept.

__________________
Garrett French
Editor, WebProNews.com
http://www.WebProNews.com

Tim has stated on another forum that he was taken out of context in a webpronews article. Is this the article he was talking about?

It was more that I was referring specifically to naive new SEOs when the quote about banning was mentioned. I was not referring to SEO in general. We were discussing specifically how a lot of new people that are getting into SEO read about SEO techniques, on bulletin boards/newsgroups such as these, that are often considered over optimizing and when their site gets banned they get very angry as they were not aware of the consequences of using these techniques. That was the context of the "we ban them" comment. It was said in an unfortunate and somewhat sympathetic tone which did not come across in the article.
Garrett, I have no problem with the article but I wanted to just clarify the context of the quote as some people have been asking me about it.

Thanks for the clarification, Slurp.

Inktomi's history of banning sites is probably a sensitive issue to both Yahoo and webmasters.

I get the impression webmasters are hunkering down for a long battle with Yahoo on this front, given their past experiences with Inktomi.