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We asked the question in the past, Can an Email Address Be Counted as a Back Link? Well, maybe the answer is yes.
I was looking at Excel Diamonds backlinks in Yahoo! Site Explorer for fun and found that Yahoo! was listing an email address as a link. Well, kinda.
As you can see from the image below (if you can't see, click on it for a larger view), Yahoo is showing that they indexed an email address and they consider it a link. Why?
So I clicked on explore URL, exploring the email address, and it showed me there is a link from this email address at my personal blog.
So I clicked over and noticed, my client accidently put his email address in the location of the web address for when he commented.
So, technically, it is wrapped in an <a href=" but it is also linking to sales@excel and the @ symbol should make it invalid. However, my server people must have made it work, because when I try that URL in my browser, it works fine.
So, clearly this needs to be 301 redirected. But should Yahoo! know better? Nah, I'll take the blame for this.
Technically, Yahoo! is indexing a link and not an email address. So I have yet to see evidence of an email address that can earn link popularity.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
Comments:
Lea de Groot
06/02/2007 09:17 am
No, thats a perfectly valid URL - its telling the destination to use a username of 'sales' to log the vistor into something. Not used very often, admittedly.
Petro
06/04/2007 07:53 am
Hi Technically, http://sales@exceldiamonds.com is not an e-mail, but an URL in which you specify the user (in this case, the user == "sales"). For example, you may use an URL so formed for authentication purposes (as well as in FTP). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL for further clarifications about standard URL syntax. In the end, mistake was not Yahoo's, but webmaster's.
Barry Schwartz
06/04/2007 12:52 pm
Right, that is what I said Petro.
Nishantha
08/23/2007 05:30 pm
dear Sir when I try that URL in my browser, it not working .any softwear for that to install