Yahoo! Store Book, Ystore Blog, & 2006 Seminars!

Yahoo! Search Engine Spidering and Indexing Yahoo! Store Internal Site Search Queries

Nothing all that exciting, but it looks like Yahoo! Search is spidering and indexing store site searches: Take a gander at this! See here, too... I thought there was a robots.txt that stopped the spiders, but it doesn't look like it.

Quick Tip: I just found a really cool way to see what other stores are actually selling. If you're a search geek like me, you can probably see what I'm talking about. Email me at rob @ ystore dot com and I'll tell you. I don't want to post something this good out here where the evildoers
can find it.

PS Finding good drop shippers or wholesalers who will drop ship for you is tough. Chris Malta's DropShip Source Directory is good. Full disclosure: I'm an affiliate, so I get paid if you click on this link and buy something. Just FYI.

Sneaky Redneck Competitive Intelligence Trick #127

• If you ever want to find out a competitor's dropship wholesale supplier, all you have to do is place an order.

• The shipping label on the box will most likely have the return address of the supplier. Pop that address into a reverse look-up tool and voila! Now you have a new supplier!

• For example, for a $25 order I found a supplier with 800,000 products, warehouses all over the country, and even I got a cool bracket for my "roof rack."

Another Cool Competition Busting Trick #128

• If you have to order something, at least order something cheap! How can you find the cheapest thing they sell when they only sell $500+ widge-a-midgets? Froogle 'em. Filter by store and sort by price.

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People keep stealing my Yahoo! Store images!

What can you do about competitors stealing your images off your Yahoo! Store? It drives me freaking nuts when I spend a lot of time taking pictures only to have someone right-click and save my image to their desktop and quickly upload the content to their Web site.

First, accept reality. For anyone to see a page on your Yahoo! Store and see your product images, they have to actually download a copy of your text and images to their computer and it sits in a cache in their Temporary Internet files Folder. That's how browsers work. You can't really stop that.

First thing I do on my best images is to brand my name/url all over the image!

I watermark my Yahoo! Store product images in such a way that when you look at it, you can see my name and brand, but when someone steals it, they'll have to spend serious time cutting out and airbrushing over my logo because the it's on top of the product image enough to make altering it harder than simply cropping the photo a little tighter.

I also use third-party proprietary image watermarking software*  that secretly imbeds a little bit of code in the image, so when I find someone who has stolen something, I can prove it's mine (and so can my lawyers).

* I'm not telling posting exactly how it works so image thieves can't work around that, too, but if you email me, I'll tell you. (rob at ystore dot com)

Stop really dumb competitors  from stealing your images by stopping right clicks!

Here's a link to a Javascript you can add to your head tags field that from stop right-clicking on your images.

When a competitor of your steals your images,  it's bad enough. When your competitor is also a distributor and allows their retailers to copy their images (some of which are stolen from you),  it's time to call in the lawyers.

The best way to catch image and content thieves is on your newest products. Lots of times you'll be the first site on the Web with a new product photo, because it takes manufacturers time to get their official product photos distributed to all their retailers.

For example, when the new Sportdog SD-2000's came out, our friends at Sportdog (Hey, Lance Tracy!) had a pretty basic product shot.  I threw the image in Paint Shop Pro and pimped it out a little bit.

The first thing I do is set up a Google Alert for the 5 most common names of the product.

Example:  sportdog sd-2000, sportdog sd2000, sportdog s d2000, sport dog sd2000, Wetland hunter, sportdog wet land hunter collar, etc.

Google notifies me via e-mail on a daily basis when Google finds a new page with these keywords. Once a day (if there's news) I get a Google Alert for each search I want. The email has hot links to easily remove or create different alerts.

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This week's headache comes from eBay auctions...

I just got a reply email from eBay's Customer Service department pointing out their limitations on liability relating to material online which says they just host the stuff. EBay's not responsible,  blah blah blah.

Here's where to get the magic form to fax in:
Download a copy of our Notice of Claimed Infringement (NOCI) form

After you fill this out, you'll be allowed to submit complaints via email. Cool! More in a bit! -- Rob

"It's fun to fax them a DMCA..."