That is a nightmare … going to sphinn it and see if we can get some traction in the SEO community

Totally irresponsible of both Yahoo! and McAfee. These big companies often act quite irresponsibly when it comes to how they handle the needs and issues of other sites that come rely on their paid and non-paid relationships with the likes of Yahoo (or Google for that matter). Who’s internet is it, afterall?

David, I agree that Yahoo needs to take more responsibility here. It’s shocking to see thier responses when this is such a clear opportunity for them to support their advertisers and rise above Google from a customer service standpoint. What a miss.

While it’s unfortunate, it seems the best place to take the fight is to McAfee. The SiteAdvisor page does give you the site owner a place to post a comment. You could also ask your happy customers and friends who know you are not a spammer to register as a reviewer and post positive comments. And, since the test indicates a somewhat dated Oct 2007 test date, I would think McAfee would be willing to re-test your site.

Good luck and thanks for alerting me to this issue.

Thanks for the support. I will continue my campaign today.

Richi, as stated above, I did contact McAfee through the recommended channel. No answer. We also tried reaching our contact at McAfee. No answer. What is Rule #1? He who has the gold makes the rules?

I can see why McAfee would ignore me. The system works. I can find only 2 sites listed as spammers in hundreds of keywords: AnyCoupons and Excite. I assume bother are false positives. That tells me that McAfee rarely makes mistakes (yes, it did in our case) and that there is no need for Yahoo to use this system for SPAM. It may make sense for downloads.

Again, the issue here is less about technology and more about Customer Service. A false positive on a beta service wouldn’t be the end of the world… if Yahoo were willing to correct it. This is like Audi in the 1980s. There was a problem with the accelerator. Audi told owners that it was the fault of the driver and not the car. Audi was right… and lost 50% of its US sales the next year. In this case, Yahoo is both wrong and blowing customer service. Yahoo, the most trafficked website in the world, looks foolish claiming that it has no control over its websites or two of its advertising systems.

We’ll see if I have any luck today. I will try escalating it a bit more.

-David

Very sorry I missed that bit about you contacting McAfee. Presumably you went through the “websiteOwnerVerification” process?

This behavior is endemic in the anti-spam world. The problem is that anyone who sets themselves up as a judge of who is a spammer gets quickly be swamped with bogus complaints. They come from actual spammers who are trying to convince the service that they’re really legitimate direct marketers.

The people receiving the spammers’ complaints quickly learn the essential truth behind Rule#1 — that is, “Spammers lie” (for all the rules, see http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html ).

This, unfortunately, raises the bar for folks with a legitimate grievance.

I would fly out to their corporate headquaters and find someones butt to kick. I had seen those sends spam in the search results and was totally confused because the site they had listed doesn’t send spam either. Totally bogus…the paid inclusion thing is beyond horrendous.

David I agree, mismanagement is a big issue there resulting in their lack of ability to catch Google…have you ever hosted a site with yahoo and tried to get some help there…OM freaking G…the morons they have in customer service and so called management.

Shane, you may need to tweak siteadvisor algorithm. It would not be appropriate to sign up on someone’s blog and after receiving on email from them via an email list, to put them on McAfee Spam list.

You need to read the disclosure that bloggers have with regards to sending emails to users.

I am not saying that you should allow Website owners to abuse and Spam their users, but there is something like common courtesy.

Also I hope you are signing up with siteadvisor email address not some Hotmail or Yahoo fake address, because that would be entrapment.

I run an anti-Spam project PHSDL http://www.phsdl.net and I provide the service on volunteer bases to Mr. King at Aboutus.org, that is where I know you guys from.

I started the project in the first place because Akismet, Yahoo uses them and has bloggers collect Spam data for them, has too many false positives.

I hope my suggestions are useful and you will consider implementing them.

David, sorry with the technical part, I hope Yahoo will clear the problem up for you ASAP.

I and other concerned industry individuals are making this problem public, so hopefully you will not have to wait long.

Regards,
Igor

UPDATE: Just got a call from our Outrider rep. Yahoo asked him to get a statement from me that we don’t SPAM or sell member e-mail addresses. I pointed out that not only did I state it publicly here but that McAfee no longer considers us spammers and has changed us from red to yellow. Yahoo seems to have no way to get updates.

I put on my product management hat and contemplated how I would have designed the SearchScan system. Of course, I would have tested it first instead of rolling it out on all SERPs. Of course, I would have tested it on SERPs before using it as a filter for Paid Inclusion and Paid Search partners. Of course I would have notified the internal teams and our agency partners. Of course, I would have made sure that any company whose campaigns were managed by my reps received notice. Of course, there would be an escalation procedure. Of course, we wouldn’t tell any of our partners that the burden was on them to contact a company that they had no relationship wtih but on whose automated system we were relying. All of that aside, how would I have built the systems differently?

First, I would have an override box. McAfee might be wrong. Give our team a way to override it. Create an option for the override to expire in a week or two or to be indefinite. The expiration period would give McAfee time to retest and the indefinite would be for sites that McAfee just got wrong but we knew were right.

The override would trigger a message to McAfee to retest. I’d work with McAfee to make sure that its systems could receive the messages. We could always start with e-mails if we didn’t anticipate many complaints.

Then there is the question of updates. It’s been a couple of hours since our status went from red to yellow and Yahoo still doesn’t know about it. I’d make sure that we were receiving updates from McAfee on a regular (hourly?) basis. If possible, I would want to get the changes sent as soon as possible as opposed to a complete file. It’s really only the changes that I would need. Those could be instantaneous as they happen. Hell, I’d be Yahoo so I could demand something like that. [I’ve negotiated with Yahoo a few times and they always demand things like that.]

That’s all that was required. It’s pretty simple stuff. Again, Jerry, I’m here to help!

Mike, that’s a great point.

Excite is the only other alleged spammer I was able to find on Yahoo SERPs. (If anyone find others, please let me know.)

It appears that Excite has a different issue. Take a look at http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/excite.com/email

It looks like McAfee opted in to receive e-mails from third parties. There is an option on the sign up form that defaults to Yes.

“Excite may make the information that I supplied available to selected Third party companies so that they may contact me regarding services that may be of interest to me.”

Excite sent the e-mails that McAfee opted in for and McAfee deemed that to be SPAM. That seems wrong.

-David

At the end of the day (and I mean that literally)…

* McAfee made a partial fix. Even though I have proven that we could not have sent the e-mails (we don’t know that the e-mail address is attached to SiteAdvisor) and even though McAfee admits that it gets false positives and the looks like one, AnyCoupons is listed as a Yellow Alert.

* Yahoo continues to list AnyCoupons as a spammer on its SERPs even though Yahoo has knows that McAfee changed the site’s rating from Red to Yellow. In case Yahoo didn’t know and because I made my offer above, I sent an e-mail to Jerry Yang today. No reply.

* Yahoo continues to ban us from Paid Inclusion. Outrider has several people in New York and Sunnyvale working to rectify the situation. Yahoo knows that McAfee has changed its rating for the site from Yellow to Red. No crawl. No traffic.

* Yahoo Search Marketing has not reinstated our disabled campaigns. Our rep has not answered my last two e-mails. It could be because I told him first that I don’t want to hear that Yahoo is powerless to manage its own advertiser relationships (assuming I’d hear it was McAfee’s fault for our campaigns going offline) and then that I don’t want to hear that we have to resubmit our campaigns to compensate for Yahoo’s mistake.

I expect that Yahoo will, at some point, remove the red warning without comment, without notice, without an apology and without compensation.

I expect that Yahoo will, at some point, reinstate us in Paid Inclusion without comment, without an apology and without compensation. We will get notice from Outrider.

I expect that Yahoo Search Marketing will advise us that we will be permitted to resubmit our campaigns that it wrongly removed without an apology, without compensation and without any offer of assistance to get through YSM’s Editorial Department (not the same group that Jay Gallanatti ran). We advertise a lot less post-Panama… no need to rub that in.

It is ironic that I would have my company not advertise at YSM, formerly Overture, formerly GoTo. I spent a few years of my life evangelizing GoTo and paid search. My job was to sell the portals, search engines and browsers on using GoTo’s paid search results. I hopped over the Atlantic to help get the big European Internet companies in England and Germany to adopt it. I drank the Kool-Aid in 1999 and it hasn’t worn off. [Sigh]

Maybe Yahoo will “get it” tomorrow. Then again…

Unfortunately the tendency is for big companies to remedy things as you said David, “without comment, without notice, and without an apology” since to admit fault publicly may open them up to litigation. What’s interesting is that in a recent program I heard on NPR is that most people are simply looking for acknowledgment and remedy of a situation rather than litigation.

I do want to applaud David for the method he is using in taking on Yahoo.

Cumbrowski.com is currently listed as a yellow

This reminds me of my Google pixie dust battle over paid reviews.

It might also be a good reason not to trust Akismet for comment spam if you are using subscribe to comments on a blog.

I suppose the most shocking thing is you actually received traffic from Yahoo in the first place.

p.s. there seems to be some memory problems on the server
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 338 bytes) in /usr/www/users/revenews/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 257

David, I am glad Yahoo is listing. If we all as SEOs, SMCs, and developers have to make a lot of noise for them to listen to us and fix their problems, then that is what we will do.

I am glad Andy Beard came around, because he is really a strong advocate for Webmasters, against the injustices done by search engines and other Internet companies to them.

What Andy said about Akismet is very true. Once Akismet has you on their list it is a very big problem to get off it. The way Aksimet works is that layman Yahoo bloggers mark comments to Blogs as Spam and it goes to Akismet Spam list. So if someone’s comments are off topic they will be marked as Spam. Once a domain is on the Akismet Spam list, a domain owner cannot post to all the blogs that use the Akismet filter.

I wonder if McAfee Siteadviser works with Akismet?
Andy Beard, Loren Baker, David Naylor, and I speak against Akismet and its false positive problems.

This is the complaint that PHSDL filed against Akismet http://www.phsdl.net/phsdl-vs-akismet-complaint.php

Let’s block real Spam not commentators and Webmasters.

Hot**
Dear Yahoo: You’re Fired http://tinyurl.com/3w9a99

I have had a very similar experience with both Yahoo and McAfee. Mine has been more on the McAfee site.

I originally found our ’spam’ rating a couple of months ago. I have contacted McAfee through forums, online chat, feedback forms, complaint addresses etc. Their complete lack of response and support on siteadvisor is very time-consuming and extremely frustrating.

I do have an issue with McAfee’s lack of support.

I also take issue with Yahoo as well. I couldn’t agree with you more about Yahoo’s dismissive responses on how sites appear in their search results. It’s not McAfee’s problem what appears in Yahoo. It’s Yahoo’s problem.

I personally view it as yet another reason to use Google.

However, it can’t be excused when many other people use Yahoo and a business has to have a marketing/search presence there.

If there is anyone at McAfee that can help me get our site rating corrected, please contact.

From an article about this in eWeek:

Priyank Garg, director of product management for Yahoo Search, said one of the reasons the company launched the feature in beta was because it was not sure it had caught all the issues.

I appreciate Priyank agreeing with me. It’s too bad he and his team did not treat it that way at launch. I should not have gotten the e-mails from Gabriel if this truly were being treated as beta by Yahoo. Then again, the team at Outrider shouldn’t have had to make more than one call to Yahoo if this were being treated as beta by Yahoo.

Yahoo needs to learn how to launch new services correctly and how to treat its users and the victims of its mismanagement.

David,

I skimmed this piece (having returned from a stay at my friendly neighborhood hospital) but let me add an important caveat. In order for McAffee to scan sites, rogue or legitimate, they have to use bots. The 60 million dollar question- Do THEY obey robots.txt ?

I am willing to bet they do not. Best practice anyone?

regards,
Wayne

There is a nice article on ChannelWeb.

Angie & Eric, I need to warn you that your blood will boil as McAfee claims that it quickly retests whenever a website notifies it about a false positive. If only that were true.

Again, you can read more about SiteAdvisor on my other post. This one really is about Yahoo.

To give an update, one week after Yahoo admitted that a mistake was made and AnyCoupons is not a spammer, the red warning was removed. The final page to have it was our Privacy Policy. Nice touch, eh?

Two weeks after our feed was reinstated to Paid Inclusion. Why the extra two week? I don’t know.

Pending is YSM. As predicted, we need to go to Editorial again. What I didn’t realize was that we have a lot of old campaigns (remember, long-standing relationship) which need to be updated based on changed standards (e.g. the Short Description is required now). YSM is helping update but we are again paying in our time and delays in getting our listings reinstated.

I helped build what is now YSM (don’t worry, there are several people whom I give more credit to and am willing to name them), and I am at the point of walking as an advertiser. It really is a shame.

Thought I would post another quick update.

Seems that yahoo has removed the ‘red’ rating from –some– of the pages cataloged for crye-leike.com. I cannot figure out a pattern for how they have removed/kept the red warning. There is still a red warning on many deep links and subdomains, but not on just the main home page. It is still not updated correctly, but interesting there has been an update.

They really need to look at that too… the application of penalty on all pages/subdomains not necessarily even associated with the page/site they ‘tested’.

Interesting update here…. I posted a comment on Yahoo’s blog post about SiteAdvisor integration
(http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000578.html). My comment did not get posted live….however after the comment was posted more of our pages were removed from the ‘harmful’ index label.

It looks like Yahoo has still not updated all of the pages indexed on our sites. Primiarily looks like all of the pdf files in the search results are still flagged harmful. There are some other subdomains as well. So I’m still not sure of their logic for partially removing some flags, but not others.

Still no update on the McAfee side. However I thought I would post the link to Yahoo’s blog in case anyone here wants to try sending in a comment over there as well.