Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Today I was checking eight keywords to see where they rank within Yahoo for the top 1,000 positions. I do this on Google, Yahoo & MSN for new clients so we can have milestones along the way.

This is normally an easy process for me because I set the search results to display maximum for each of the three search engines. In Yahoo I am able to display 100 results per page.

Imagine my surprise when I received this:

Sorry, Unable to process request at this time — error 999.

 

I’ve never seen this error so I thought at first that it was something internal with Yahoo. However I asked two of my co-workers to see if they can conduct any searches and they both were able to. At that point I cleared my cache, deleted my cookies and all that fun stuff. Same error! I even tried using firefox and still I get the same error.

On the error page there are a few reasons given as to why I might be seeing this page. The one in particular that stood out has this to say:

This problem may be due to unusual network activity coming from your Internet Service Provider. We recommend that you report this problem to them.

Now I know there are measures set in place with Yahoo that helps prevent automated quarries. I’ve used Web Position Gold for the purposes of reporting on numerous keywords for years now and there has always been a built in time delay for Yahoo.

So what gives? Is Yahoo tightening their detection of automatic quarries or am I just too damned fast at what I do? Personally I think they are looking to reduce bandwidth costs and therefore are tightening their detection programs. I’ve been doing this kind of search on Yahoo for a few years now and I’ve never had this problem.

Yahoo should look into virtualization through VMWare instead of risking user experience

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