Many webmasters have been familiar with using the [tag]Yahoo[/tag]/[tag]Overture[/tag] [tag]Keyword Selector Tool[/tag] to see what keywords search engine users are using in their web searches. Obviously, having access to such data allowed legit small-time and niche market webmasters to target their audience without having to used “paid inclusion” services such as Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords. Well, it looks like the days of [tag]search engines[/tag] actually being search engines are over, and we are now stuck with advertising engines. If you are not paying for inclusion, you can forget about your site even ranking in the major search engines for top keywords, but now with Overture/Yahoo stripping non-corporate webmasters of the Keyword Selector Tool, it seems even targeting the lesser value keywords is something webmasters who can’t afford paid inclusion will have to do without.
The quality of Yahoo’s search results has been declining consistently over the last 5-7 years and is now at an all time low. I happened to go over to Yahoo today to search for a few of my “lesser keywords” where I actually had some ranking and it seems Yahoo would rather return dead links and spammy ClickBank style sites than return sites of merit. While I was there conducting my search, I noticed a “sponsored result” for a forum that I had never heard of in the particular community I have been a major player in for years, and this “sponsored search” claimed the forum had 50,000 members and over 1 Million posts, so I had to click the paid link and check this forum out. Well, to my horror, the forum was a duplicate of a friend of mine and industry leaders forum, meaning the people who placed the Yahoo “sponsored search” had used a PHP or Perl script to copy my friends forum post for post.
Not quite content to harp on Yahoo alone, I went to Google and made the same exact search, and guess what? The same plagarized/stolen forum showed up in the [tag]Google[/tag] “sponsored links”. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry, that Google and Yahoo are so concerned with grabbing all the PPC dollars they can that they would let an entirely plagarized/stolen forum, with over a million posts on the original forum, turn up in their “sponsored links”. We’re talking about a million copied posts, and with all of [tag]Matt Cutts[/tag] and Google’s hullabaloo about “[tag]duplicate content[/tag]” and such that keeps us “white hat” SEO people writing our own articles and not plagarizing, is obviously overlooked as long as the listing is paid for.
To make matters worse, Google has already even given the plagarized/stolen content forum a PageRank 1 :-(
In case you’re wondering and would like to see the forums that I’m talking about…
The original forum is : http://www.talkgold.com/forum/
The Plagarized forum : http://www.thegoldmoney.com/forum/
Utterly dispicable and equally as shameful on Google Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing’s part for accepting money for this blatantly stolen content.
