I have noticed recently that adding our RSS feeds to My Yahoo is not that easy any more. It will find the feed you enter the URL for, even display its contents, but when you click “Add to My Yahoo” it will only refresh the page you’re on and nothing else will happen, the feed won’t be added. I have tested this with different sites’ feeds, with different Yahoo accounts, from different computers with different IPs, and at different time of day and night – same thing happens. Sometimes I seem to catch it off guard and then it would add my feed, but most of the time iit seems like the server responsible for it is down – or do they turn it off on purpose, to lower the number of feeds submitted to their database through My Yahoo pages??? I can imagine now that most SEOs know and use this trick, Yahoo should be getting plenty of these submissions, so maybe they decided to if not close this backdoor completely then at least limit its accessibility to a couple hours a day only?
If that’s the case, this is not a good decision on Yahoo’s part. With Google’s launch of their new feed and blog indexing service Blog Search, Yahoo needs to stay competitive in this area as well. While of course My Yahoo Add Content service generates a lot of spam in their database – this is a source for Yahoo to get to know about completely legitimate sites publishing RSS feeds as well – not to mention the fact that officially, this service exists not even for Yahoo itself but for people to be able to use their My Yahoo page as an online aggregator for reading different feeds. Not very nice, Yahoo…
Comments are closed.