It is getting amazing. We are receiving more and more people complaining about being locked out of their Yahoo! Mail accounts every day. I am starting to worry that another eBay email scam is going on right now and it is affecting Yahoo! Mail customers. I have tried to get some answers from a few users to see if they had received an email from Yahoo! about their account before they were locked out, but I have not heard back yet.

We have seen a lot of people posting about being locked out of their account and many have attributed this to their accounts being hacked. I usually dismiss this type of asessment as most people that say their account has been hacked don’t really know what that means. But, it appears that many people are being locked out of their accounts because vital information like their birthday have been changed from the inside. In this thread entitled Someone Hacked My Account many users are reporting that Yahoo! customer service is unable to do anything to remedy the situation. I can understand Yahoo! point of view that not being able to provide vital information like date of birth being paramount. But, there have to be other items that people can use to get their account back. How about providing a list of people that can be found in their contact list or describing emails found in their inbox?

These days you really don’t get anything for free. I am not sure you did back in the old days, but one this is for sure, everyone is out for something today. So, how do you get something for next to free? When it comes to the internet, there are many ways to get free advertising or advertising for a very low fee that can be very effective. One of the exciting new ways people can some great advertising for their website is to join a free advertising cooperative like the one at DigitalPoint. The Digitalpoint network allows you to run advertisements (text or banner) on member sites. Your site’s “weight” in the network is determined by the number of pages you have in the Google index and your site’s Page Rank. This is the first coop network that I learned about on the internet and I can say that it can benefit any website that joins.

Are we beginning to see the end of mighty Google’s reign as the “top” search engine? I think that there are more and more people out there who are feeling this way. We all know that Google has been creating much havoc lately with their last two “updates” and many people are complaining that the search results returned are becoming more and more irrelevant. But, I just read an article from one of SEO Chat’s moderators and long time SEO community memeber “Dazzlindonna” on her SEO Blog. Apparently, Google has decided to implement a few new “features” in their latest toolbar release. I don’t use the G toolbar anymore as I use FireFox, but apparently Google feels it is okay to insert links on the fly that appear to be on your webpage for people that are using the new toobar. Sounds to me like Google is getting a little too big for their britches. Won’t be long now before someone comes along and sets Google straight. Pretty funny really. I guess it is ok to do “no evil” when it comes to web surfers, but if you are a publisher it is okay to get screwed. Nice work G and good luck.

Funny how elusive companies or customer service operations can be when it comes to giving out their phone number. My personal favorite is when the customer service rep I was speaking to at Pac Bell (a phone company for those of you who don’t know) told me that I could not call their dispute department because, “they don’t have phones.” Interesting. You would think the phone company would give a phone to anyone.

Perhaps the most elusive phone number on the internet today is the phone number for Yahoo! customer service. Recently we found the number 408-349-5151 and posted it in our Yahoo customer service forum, where people with problems that are Yahoo related can come to help each other out…mostly because they can’t get anyone at Yahoo! to help them.

What a bummer. You are on vacation, you bring your laptop, probably because you feel like you should get “some” work done, and you get rewarded with some donkey sniffing your login and taking down your site. If that wasn’t bad enough, they deleted everything from the server. Well, this just happened to SEO Guy and it could happen to you too. Morgan used an unencrypted public wireless network while on vacation in Mazatlan, Mexico. So, I guess you can chalk this up to one more thing you don’t want to do in Mexico.

Well, for those of you in the SEO/SEM community you are well aware of the recent happenings over at Google. There have been many ideas swirling abound as to the reasons behind what we are seeing. Whatever the case may be and the reasons for them, one thing is for sure. We all need some support right now. As an example, our site here has always enjoyed some decent positioning for some smaller keywords releated to customer service software and help desk software, but nothing major. As we worked to increase our content and links to and from helpful resources, we say steady increases in site traffic from related searches. Then one day a few weeks ago, Google decided to stop sending any traffic here. We went from receiving hundreds of searches a day to zero. We were told that there was a possible duplicate content issue with our site as there were a number of different ways to see the same content by going to http://www.supportsentry.com/ and http://supportsentry.com/ . Now that issue has been resolved and on Friday of last week, we began to receive some limited search traffic from Google. Well, it appears that there is no way to tell why we have received that traffic, which has pretty much ceased again. The new update or whatever you want to call what they are doing has made many people very unhappy. Unfortunately, none of us know why they are doing what they are doing and we will probably never know why. We all just need to pat each other on the back and keep working at our businesses as we were before. Hopefully, our friends at Google will find there way back and return to life as ususal.

There has been a lot of talk lately about duplicate content and how Google is dealing with it in a much stricter fashion recently. Most of the talk about duplicate content, from the experts, has been related to people not redirecting traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com. For one reason or another, Googlebot has picked up pages without the www. in front and since they treat websites with different Cnames (what comes in front of domain.com) as different sites a duplicate content filter kicks in. This site happens to suffer from what appears to be a duplicate content filter. By searching for something on Google that used to produce a top ranking, now produces nothing for this site. But, placing “filter=0″ to the end of the search query string, shows the results as they used to look.

One day, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Google’s traffic stopped. Needless to say, this site receives hundreds of search visits from Google every day. Now it receives none. I began to read about a “duplicate content filter” on DP and SEW and took a look at what Google had in their index for this site. It turns out that Google not only had pages for www.suppportsentry.com, but they had pages for supportsentry.com and secure.supportsentry.com. Ouch. So, we immediately made secure.supportsentry.com off limits to any bot in the .htaccess file and did a 301 redirect to send all traffic to www.supportsentry.com and not to supportsentry.com.

There could be good news already. I noticed yesterday and today that we received a few search visits from Google, which we have not for a couple of weeks. I am hoping that tomorrow, the filter will have been lifted and this was all that the problem was.

With the announcement of the new MSN Search going live today, I began to poke around MSN Search’s Blog. I came across an interesting post talking about the ability to add MSN Search queries as an RSS feed in your My MSN account. Recently we read that entering your Blog’s RSS feed into your My Yahoo! account can help you to get your new pages indexed into Yahoo! search index more quickly and frequently I thought I would check this out. Sure enough, you can enter RSS feeds into your My MSN account as well as entering an RSS feed for a MSN Search query. I will be doing some testing over the next week to see what if any effect this has on the new blog pages getting indexed into MSN Search vs. blogs that are not in My MSN account.