Laura Lippay, Yahoo’s SEO manager, posted a response to the recent topic about Yahoo! Autos cloaking.

There are dozens of groups within Yahoo who manage hundreds of products and properties that maintain some of the largest, most trafficked sites on the internet consisting of millions of pages and gobs of new content being pushed out all day long every day. This operation involves a good chunk of our 11,000 employees including project managers, designers, engineers, marketers and partners. For all of this activity and mayhem, there are a handful of us SEOs checking, recommending, emailing, chatting, educating, researching, reporting, testing and generally playing SEO supermom(/dad) .

No question that this is a difficult role and there will be things that slip through.  Sometimes in a company this large the best you can hope for is the 80/20 rule.

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.

I’m not sure if everyone else read it as such but I certainly didn’t think my post had the tone of “the world is coming to an end”.  But I did point out the hypocrisy and I stand by it.

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.

First, I’d say that it looked pretty intentional.  Whether it was her intention or someone else’s intention is not the issue.

Second, I think it’s a great idea to have an automated system for SEO QA.  It wouldn’t be difficult to develop a system that would dynamically crawl a new site or product and analzye it for unique Title tags, Meta tags, <h> tags, etc, on each page.  The program could also check the keyword density on each page, ensure all pages are crawlable, report duplicate content, etc.  Checking for IP or agent delivery could also be built into this sytem.

To be continued……..