Yahoo I don’t like this !

I saw a test the other day that Google’s Adsense CTR increases with 200% if you remove the ‘Ads by Google’ block (which is strictly forbidden of course). I suppose this works the same way… Sneaky, but smart.

I just tried your search (I’m in Canada) at Yahoo.com and .co.uk, and my sponsored results are blue both times. Maybe just a test you were seeing.

Totally agree with you. It’s shockingly bad that they are doing stuff like this.

Wow, I would think Yahoo would know better, I am sure they will catch hell for this.

it looks that on all SE organic results are getting lower and lower each day 🙁

He searched through the Guardian, see it here:

http://uk.hs.search.yahoo.com/search?p=slimming&sitesearch-radio=web&go-guardian=Search&fr=cb-guardian

And indeed, it sucks.

Yahoo has 16 paid spots and just 10 natural listings. They beat Google with 16 to 11 on this one. Yahooooo..

Yeah I just ran a test Yahoo in Australia and the results are in blue. Very sneaky if they push out organic looking paid results!

I’ve recenty found & modified a wordpress theme that is givng me 15% – 20% CTR for my adsense blocks. I ran it past Google and they are ok with it.

Yahoo also allows an advertiser to pay for first position in a search for a set click price. You get to have all of that traffic at a predetermined price BUT you must pay for all of the traffic you get and you cannot cut the ad off until the end of the month you are paying for. This can make for a very expensive bill to Yahoo. The service, or “product” is called Search Submit Pro, or SSP for short.

Now that is tricky!

It is funny with Google pushing everyone to make it obvious if a link is paid that Yahoo would try something like this. It is so deceptive. I hope they correct it soon or organic listings on Yahoo will be almost worthless.

To be fair though, I can’t see the difference of colours when I tried on Ask… they all seem to be blended as well.

i dont understand why it matters, daven do you not have sites where you blend adsense or any other ads into content im sure you do. So long as the ads are relevant to the search why shouldnt they be blended?

You can hardly say that Ask’s color differentiation is much better. You have to look pretty hard to see that.

3 should be the max number for sponsored listings above (2 is better). Any more is just gross, naked greed…getting in the way of serving their customers. That kind of behavior will destroy the fabric of trust between the SERPs and the customers.

Talk about “doing evil”.

You’d have thought/hoped that Yahoo would be doing everything possible to keep itself user friendly in the war against Google…

this blog is like wine, every post getting better and better 🙂

I have just started dabbling in Adwords, but I think organic results are the best way for the searcher to find what they are truly searching for. Yahoo is trying to spike the number of sites that participate in paid for listings, it started with paid inclusions to the yahoo directory. It is only a matter of tome before they place the organic listings on the 2nd or 3rd page, killing the number of “qualified” sites presented to the searcher, just to turn a buck. This will kill Yahoo’s credibility to the users.

I think the same things with you. But there is nothing to do..

The results would be even better hidden for searches done in Firefox than in they would in IE, since you don’t even get sponsored links distinguished by the bulleted as opposed to numbered lists in Firefox. That’s bad and naughty!

Yahoo I don’t like this !

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