Resourceful

Yahoo Search Filled With Search Ads

If you visit Yahoo and do a search at their web site, you will see that to get to the organic listings, you are going to have to scroll and scroll and scroll. It reminds me of when Ask.com gave up on search and they pretty much filled up their search results with ads at the top and at the bottom they put some organic results.

Same with Yahoo, you get five search ads at the top and then some organic listings under it. Of course, you also have ads on the right side of the page. You can search for almost anything on Yahoo Search and get these ads. Search for [flowers], [laptops], [SEO] or whatever and you get five ads.

Here is a screen shot of what is on the visible screen, at least mine, and I have a pretty big screen:

Yes, just ads.

Here is a full page screen shot where you can see the whole page, click on it to enlarge:

Glenn Gabe posted about this on Twitter and wrote “OK, I haven’t been to Yahoo for a while. Just tested some searches… and then had to test a few times to make sure. Yep, they are adding *5* ads above the organic listings + no ad labels. Then shopping ads on the right + right sidebar ads. Holy cow. It’s Adhoo, not Yahoo.”

Indeed.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Bing Webmaster API Still Broken After 2 Weeks - No Fix In Sight

Over a week ago, I reported that Bing Webmaster Tools API was down and then began using some of my channels to find out what is up. All of my channels failed to lead to an answer. Plus those who have directly contacted the technical support folks at Bing have been getting the run around. The API is still down, about two weeks later!

He shared a screen shot with me of the API erroring out:

Others have confirmed with me that this is indeed true, the API is not working.

Mike said he got a response that “"Engineering is investigating” but nothing since. He is being told by some people to subscribe to an Azure support service but there are no support services for Azure specifically for the Bing Webmaster Tools API.

You can try it yourself by logging into your Bing Webmaster Tools area, going to the API section, generating your own key and trying out their API.

It is unclear if it is down because Microsoft no longer wants to support it or if some spammer is messing with it where it cannot return results?

Either way - Microsoft has not been responsive at all to webmaster concerns about their API.

Forum discussion at Twitter.