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A Universal Truth from Yahoo Site Explorer
October 12, 2005
In preparation for my earlier post describing Yahoo Site Explorer, I was playing around with some random domains that were sure to be well indexed by Yahoo, and I came across something quite interesting. It's far too late in the day to try to interpret it, but here it is:
Needless to say, that was one URL worth exploring. Some observations and questions:
- That specific URL is the only one in the YSE index for the whitehouse.gov root page. If you explore the URL without the anchor, the SERP reverts back to the anchor-containing address.
- Obviously, that anchor doesn't appear in the current or cached version of the White House home page.
- What is the intent here - some sort of post-modern engine bomb? While I found it via Yahoo, that doesn't mean it was intended to affect Yahoo SERPs.
- The inlink page for that URL shows some interesting variety: search results pages, blogs, wiki scrapers...
- Could this be spread via some sort of PPC scraping? No funky anchor text appears to accompany the inlinks; they often use the title of the whitehouse.gov root page, "Welcome to the White House."
- What is the desired effect? If its purpose is to distort SERPs, it doesn't appear to be working, at least not yet.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 12, 2005 11:37 PM
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Comments
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