Conspiracy Theory Friday: Is Yahoo Tracking SEOs via Site:
Posted on: July 14th, 2007 by natasha robinsonOk, put on your tin foil hats. It’s time for Conspiracy Theory Friday (CTF)
I was doing a little backlink checking today, when I noticed some odd things happening with Yahoo for “link:” and “site:” queries.
In the past when I did a search in Yahoo! for “link:http://domain.com” or “site:http://domain.com” you would be redirected to Yahoo! Site Explorer and able to get the results for backlinks, etc.
Today however I have been redirected to the Yahoo! Advanced Search options and in a few instances I was directed to Log Into Yahoo!
When I decided to use Firefox and the Yahoo! Search Extension. That’s when I noticed a very odd parameter appended to each search I did: “fr2=seo-rd-se”
Example:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fsearchengineland.com
Earl Grey
I saw that last week but never actually picked up on it.
This is something that we need to look at more maybe.
Rynert
seo-rd-se is SEO Related Search perhaps…
Earl Grey
Good call Rynert.
I think you are right on that one.
IrishWonder
Nice find Natasha. Now, I wonder if Yahoo is on itsway to hiding people’s backlinks like Google does? Actually, I think I remember something about Yahoo Site Explorer only giving you so much information about a site unless you are logged in and the site in question is identified as yours…
natasha robinson
While it would suck for most of us, it totally makes sense that Y!SE would move to a “log in only” model. But, WTF is appendage about? I asked a number of other SEOs to test it as well - just to make sure it wasn’t just me - and they all got the same appendage. Now if they move to a login only model (I’ll LMAO if they announce that at SESSJ) and have that appendage stored in their database along with the sites that you have done that query for in the past, what will happen to the site that shows you “own it”?
fantomaster
I seem to recall that many years back there was a bit of a buzz regarding many search term volume figures being highly inflated due to SEOs checking their own (or their clients’) rankings all day.
And, conspiracy theory or not, it’s always been smart practice not to check your whole blooming domain portfolio in one fell swoop. While they may not have proactively tracked this in the past, it makes perfect sense to analyze these searches in greater depth to determine patterns.
That way, it wouldn’t take too long to arrive at a pretty well educated guess re who’s optimizing what.
It’s rather hilarious, though, to see them do it that openly with that funny dead giveaway of an appendate, if that’s what it really implies.