So Yahoo! was caught doing some user agent cloaking on one of its online properties. Since then, a Yahoo! rep (unconfirmed) posted an unofficial reply here.

Turns out that they weren’t trying to game the engines, but instead it was a misunderstanding of the SEO recommendations. I had given them some keyword research tools and told them to find the popular versions of the keywords relevant to the page and be sure to include them 3-4 times in the text if they could. What they ended up doing was finding all even remotely relevant keywords and copying and pasting all of them 4 times at the bottom of the page. Kinda funny misunderstanding, but I could imagine the overcrazed, overhyped, yahoo doesnt follow their own rules, what on earth is going on, oh my god the world is coming to an end blog posts & comments like these if that engineering manager hadn’t caught this at the last minute.

We do continue to work on processes here for automating all SEO checkpoints on all pages that go out every day using a complex system of publishing and CMS tools, by automation, by hand, and/or by partners. In the meantime, we will continue to whisk through the halls like SEO superheroes with a keen eye for white on white, doing our best to save the Yahoo! properties from unintentional villainous blackhat ways.

Cute reply. Now let’s see some heads roll :)