Honestly, it depends on your personal level of paranoia. I don't falsify whois information, I have my blackhat domains on the same server (even same ip) as my black hat sites. I have links to my black hat sites ON my white hat sites. I have 6 month old cloaked domains still going strong in google. They will get banned at some point, but luckily yahoo is clueless. I actually have a keyword phrase where 9 out of the top 10 serps are MY cloaked domains. I almost fell down laughing when I saw it.
9-10 makes sense because once you get your formula down for one it seems that it would be easy to duplicate. By the "yahoo is clueless" statement I assume your ads are Y!s not adwords or do you prefer CJish stuff. I'm not really utterly paranoid but I do have some corporate customers that I have done SEO for that I would prefer to keep on a totally different hosting package, just in case. Is your server sitting in your bedroom? Is there any potential doing this on a shared host? A sysadmin I am not! Your SERPs have to come from content and PR, so do you have any comments on your link building strategies?
By yahoo is clueless I mainly mean thier search engine. In my past experience they don't seem to have much in the way of duplicate content filters, or spam filters in general. While google typically catches my sites in 5-6 months, it can be years IF yahoo EVER catches on. I would definitely keep clients on another server. If something were to happen you don't want to have to make THAT phone call . My servers are all at ev1servers and softlayer. Lots of people use shared hosts though. The comment about it sitting in my bedroom is actually pretty funny because i'm in the middle of building a cluster of servers in my house. I've got 11 of them stacked in a corner so far
I agree, they are definitely after us. You just have to decide how far you want to go with covering your tracks. It's a time to money ratio lol
If I didn't know better I would think they were on your side. I have yet to rank a site in Yahoo! I have big authority sites who rank on the top of Google and MSN for major phrases but Yahoo won't pick me up for anything yet I know how easy using BH methods it is to achieve a ranking at Yahoo so I am wondering whether they are working at achieving success or lazing around. ...and then I hear people say "OHH Yahoo! is the #1 search engine"
I know the feeling visio. I can't get yahoo traffic to my automotive sites to save my life, but build a few hundred spam sites and they are all over you.
yer not missin much guys.. he he... we have rankings on YaH with ours and clients sites... I swear there is as much or more MSN/Live traffic ..... I wonder where they get the search market share numbers from? Doesn't seem to send much traffic IMO .... .. so no worries lads.....
Hm. One of my sites ranks way higher in Yahoo than any other Engine. It brings me about 15% of the traffic Google does. However, I have the feeling that Yahoo sends shoppers while Google sends surfers. MSN doesn't seem to care much about anything I do. Even though I rank comparatively on MSN (about the same as google), I have to scroll through my logs for a while to find a hit from MSN. I get more from netscape and aol search than I ever get from MSN. Sometimes a person from ASK finds their way to my sites.
I too have heard that ranked on Yahoo! is better if your site is like a shopping site as more people search for shopping via Yahoo! search engine. I forgot what article I read, but it seems that certain keywords are better at Yahoo! than Google for more traffic. Knowing this could be so helpful. You can target Yahoo! for example rather than Google. I used to try to rank top 10 on all 3 SEs and I do as much as I can generally, but some of my sites, I ignore Google and Yahoo, focusing on only MSN. Since MSN is rather easier to get ranked, at least for me it's easy. I know MSN won't bring much traffic but it's not bad to get ranked with good keywords like mesothelioxx, you know what I mean
For BH sites selling affiliate products it does seem to sell better at Yahoo. A WH site selling its own products sell best at Google IMHO if done right. Googlers tend to be more internet savvy and will do a little research while alot of Yahooers(like that?) will buy from the first site they find. Maybe that is why they say it is a shopping site. I'll go for MSN rankings anyday. They are alot more predictable than Yahoo!