When browsing through the message area of any Yahoo Group, you would think that the participating members of that group are safe from potential spambots:

email address domains are replaced with dots

However, something very curious happens when you subscribe to messages from a group. If the option is chosen to receive a daily digest via email, everyone who posts a message to that group has their entire email exposed to subscribers:

’nuff said

(well, maybe not that surprising)
It appears that the more bandwidth a search engine spider sucks away, the lower the ranking of the business site I maintain. Checking awstats at mid-month, I place the following results along with the SERP of a single, targeted keyword:

Googlebot
3.32 MB
Page 1

Yahoo Slurp
17.16 MB
Page 5

MSNBot
34.83 MB
Page 10

Almost 35 MBs in 15 days and I have restricted MSNBot to 300 second intervals. Perhaps I should keep choking it until the placement improves

I’ve moved this post to it’s own page.

I have both the Yahoo toolbar and the Google toolbar installed on my work computer’s Internet Explorer:

(Google toolbar on, Yahoo off)

(Yahoo toolbar on, Google off)

It would appear that Internet Explorer is having a bit of an identity crisis.