OMFG - Yahoo Answers is freaking funny!

Posted by stuart as stupid, yahoo

My Five year old son got a Nintendo DS for his birthday a month or so ago, which means I get to spend a lot of time scouring the web to find out how to extract Mario the Italian Plumber from his latest misadventure.

Whilst looking for information on where the gold star was on the Cool Cool Mountain, I happened across Yahoo Answers. I’d heard of this part of the Yahoo empire before, but had never actually bothered to go have a look.

Well I did….

And I was astounded. Once again, my ability to underestimate the sheer stupidity of the majority of the human race was brought home with a resounding thud!

Here’s a few of the questions I found:

• How Gay do you have to be? - Not nearly gay enough, apparently.
• Poison Ivy! What Should I Do? Leave Bloody Ivy alone. What did she ever do to you?
• What is the best way to murder somebody and get away with it? - um, riiiiiight…..
• How can you tell a sim on the sims 2 (pc) is pregnant? - You mean apart from slicing it open and looking?
  
• What do you do when you are falsely imprisoned and with a charge that has a 30 day mental stay? - Leaving this one right alone…..
  
• Why do photographers say good day whenever they first meet you? - You’d rather they tell you to fuck off?
  
• How can i hack my school computers? - From the “I have 1337 hAXoRing skillz and am not afraid to use them” dept.
• Where have all the batteries gone? - Is my face red?
• Is beta mail winning lottery is real or fake one? Actualy I got the winning mail but I am not sure is it true? For real dude. And once you get your money, I have this internet marketing e-book I’d like to talk to you about.

Why Yahoo’s demographics data is all buggered up.

Posted by stuart as stupid, yahoo

I downloaded Yahoo messenger today so I could have a yack with all round good bloke Dave Starr from Retired Pay World and Talar Systems.

After the installation, I fired it up and tried to create a new account. I entered my first and last name, my sex, and my postcode.

Seems Yahoo is another organisation that believes that the world starts at New York and ends at Los Angeles. Yeah, that’s right, I know an east coat and a west coast city in the US, bet you don’t know the same from Australia!

Apparently you can’t use Yahoo Messenger unless you have a five digit zip code. My four digit postcode is simply not up to scratch.

So what did I do? I just added a random number on the end of my post code.

Have fun with your fucked up demographic data you xenophobic twits!

Penalised for linking to bad neighbourhoods - watch your blog comments.

Posted by stuart as yahoo, domain registration, referrers, links, nofollow, linking, domain names, security, search, google adsense, wordpress, seo, spam, google

I have quite a few grey/black hat SEO blogs in my reader (and if you’re even vaguely serious about SEO, you should too). There’s lot’s of great stuff in some of these blogs, which can be applied to white hat sites as well as the shadier side of SEO.

A lot of the stuff you can learn on these blogs helps you to take a defensive position on your own sites. Knowing how a spammer finds dofollow blogs to spam, for example, helps you to keep these spammers at bay.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about link building to new sites over the last couple of weeks. One well known blackhat technique to build links is to find old/abandoned blogs, and drop your links there. It’s a fact that the ease of setting up a blog using a hosted service such as blogger or wordpress, or even the one-touch installation of blogging platforms such as Wordpress through Fantastico means that there are literally millions, if not tens of millions of abandoned blogs sitting there waiting to have links dropped on them.

Now any white, black, or any shade of grey hat SEO knows that relevant, quality links are the most valuable. But there’s also a lot to be said for getting a shitload of crappy links as well.

A well crafted Google search will return a crapload of blogs which haven’t been updated in some time, ripe for the dropping of comment spam.

This is all well and good, and not really my cup of tea, so why am I writing about it?

Because I have a crapload of abandoned blogs and forums on domains I own, that’s why.

“So what?” you might say, “let the spammers have their fun”. Which is great, except that none of those domains have private registrations, and some of them still have my AdSense code on them.

I’ve written a couple of times about the fact that sooner or later, the search engines are going to start automatically nofollowing blog comments, regardless of the href tag containing rel=”nofollow” or not.  There’s not really any argument I can come up with to justify the thought that a link from a blog comment is a “vote” for the site that it points to from the owner of the site upon which the comment is dropped.

So if the search engines are still giving some credence to links from blog comments and forum posts, they must also be applying their quality rules to them as well, and we all know that Google, especially, takes notice of where you point links to from your sites.

In my case, I’m pointing a shitload of dofollow links to really dodgy neighbourhoods: poker sites, viagra and cialis sites, and more than likely some pretty shady porn sites. All nicely presented to google with my AdSense ID and my public whois information, which is shared across most of my other sites.

Time for a bit of a tidy up, I think.

Unfortuate Yahoo ad placement

Posted by stuart as yahoo