Yahoo Mcafee join hands to pick out spammers in search results

Yahoo has tied hands with Mcafee to pick spammers from search results and warn innocent searches from potential problem they might face visiting a website. If you see the following screen shot




You can see the warning display from Yahoo search results. The site featuring in search seem to be an email spammer. Emails submitted to that site are added to some bulk email lists and results in 1000s of spam to those email IDs. Now Yahoo includes a warning to remove these potential spammers. The note says "Use caution in providing your email address. It may result in unsolicited or spammy emails" The site featuring here is carbonneutral.com a potential email spammer according to Yahoo and Mcafee.



There will be some innocent occurrences of this where sites may get flagged for sending unsolicited email whereas the people who reported the email as spam had actually elected to receive it. But this is rare most of the time email spammers are spammers regardless of whether they are guilty or Not.

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8 Comments:

Anonymous cry said...

I noticed these things on my home computer but that's because i have Mcafee running. This is in the direct SERPS. Wow. Interesting.

...makes me ponder about search engines more. so...universal search will include these kinds of things as it grows???
Reply With Quote

7:20 PM  
Anonymous semiam said...

This has actually happened to my company. Search Yahoo for "Clearwire", and we are red flagged. Dont have any answers as of yet, but we are in the process of working with them to get this fixed (hopefully). If something doesnt change soon, they will definitely be hearing from our legal team...

We are a well-known ISP, and just had a HUGE financial announcement earlier in the week, so this is causing some serious headaches, to say the least. The funny thing is, we do not send any sort of spam and screen all of our outbound e-mail campaigns very carefully and have all necessary opt-out options, etc... Im sure we are not the only ones, but this may come back to bite yahoo in their rear-ends. Anyone else having this prob?

7:21 PM  
Anonymous David Lewis said...

We have been labeled as spammers by Yahoo. I have been working since Friday to correct it with little success. Yahoo refuses to correct any of its numerous mistakes.

semiam, please contact me: david@ [our domain name]

Our site, AnyCoupons, continues to have the spam label on the Yahoo SERPs where we still show up. Most listings are gone as Yahoo terminated our more than 4 year Paid Inclusion campaign. Plus, it removed most of our YSM paid search campaigns. All of this without notice or warning.

This was based on a false positive by McAfee who has admitted its mistake and changed our spam status from Red to Yellow... over 24 hours ago!

We have contacted multiple departments at Yahoo. Outrider has unsuccessfully tried to help. It appears that Yahoo is willfully leaving this warning on its site while knowing that it is incorrect.

You can read the whole story including e-mails from Yahoo at http://www.revenews.com/davidlewis/my-life-as-a-spammer-or-so-says-yahoo/#comment-16159

There is a technical problem at McAfee and a management problem at Yahoo.

-David

7:53 AM  
Anonymous David Lewis said...

As a follow up...

We were able to get most of the issues resolved due to my blog and Outrider's efforts. It shouldn't take that.

I tried to reach Clearwire. It's tagline is "We make it easy." They don't.

I got the run-around. The only place I could get to answer was Tech Support. Not much support there except to tell me to call a local store. That was a little bizarre.

The guy in the store said he'd forward my e-mail to Legal. Not my choice of who should handle this but, OK, I sent him an e-mail. I don't expect an answer.

semiam, don't expect to see your company get delisted any time soon.

11:55 AM  
Anonymous 

Mcafee claim to authenticate all data using their own verification systems. i do believe them since their virus scanner is excellent and detects most of the spam. Also the block most of the phishing sites which help me a lot.

11:58 AM  
Anonymous power said...

Nice to see that you were able to solve your problems with Yahoo and siteadvisor, I still see some problems with your site when i search yahoo for your domain name

the 2nd URL still says ( http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGklpKhyxIcxUBl91XNyoA?p=anycoupons&fr=yfp-t-501&ei=UTF-8&fp_ip=IN&rd=r1&meta=vc%3Din )

WARNING - Unsolicited Mails - Is this temporary for your site?

12:03 PM  
Anonymous David Lewis said...

Most of the warnings have been cleared. Yahoo claims it will take days but given what I've seen in the past, it may take months for all of those to go away.

I wrote more about what I've found wrong with McAFee's SiteAdvisor at http://www.revenews.com/davidlewis/mcafee-siteadvisor/

It lists the problems and suggestions. It also gives tips on how to mess with other sites. I added that so McAfee would have to fix the problem, not to see anyone implement it.

8:19 AM  
Anonymous power said...

Good to know that you were able to clear your problems with Yahoo. I feel many site owners have to figure out a way to clear their problems too. Your blog is a good read.


Please use html tags so that you will get a link to your blog which people can ready and understand what you are saying.

I can see you are pretty serious about this issue.

P.S: When you enter URL for your name please add http:// this will enable active link. Links that you have now are all showing errors and i cant edit it for you

12:43 PM  

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