Yahoo Directory bug lets you see your competitors clients
A strange new bug in the search feature of the Yahoo Directory seems to be showing sites either hosted or extensively cross-linked with the site you are searching for.
For example when you search for Blogstorm which isn’t listed in the Yahoo Directory at present you get a list of sites that Yahoo seems to think are related in some way.
Consumerist.com isn’t a client nor do we have a relationship with them but the other site is an old blog we own.
Other searches to try are bigmouthmedia, justsearching and any other company you can think of (these were the first 2 I found from a quick Google search).
Dave Eaves from seoco.co.uk commented:
I am not very happy about my customers coming up on a search for my name, anyone could find out who they are very quickly and easily.
DaveN reckons it might be “pulling keywords from the pages that they have in the directory listings”. For example Consumerist has the word “blogstorm” on the page so it brings up a match.
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Who uses Yahoo anyway?
Google > Yahoo
Very odd. I did some brand searching in the way you suggest and found one or two sites that have carried links to me, but no actual clients or anything too worrying.
It works well with web design companies too link.
9xb were the first company I searched for too
It seems to show very old connections – bizarre!
To set the record straight, Yahoo! Directory Search is simply a subset of Yahoo! Web Search that has been restricted to the content of URLs listed in the Yahoo! Directory. So it is possible to run a search that will return results because the term is somewhere on the site that the search returns. The same exact thing happens with Web Search, only there are so many other results that the phenomenon is often masked.
Jerry Welch
Yahoo! Directory Product Manager
PS – Blogstorm is now in the Directory and will show up with the next data refresh
Forgive me but I don’t get it. How does this show your clients?