Yahoo Articles by SEO Speedwagon

June 13, 2008

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?

Sean saw it coming yesterday, and little more than a Month ago I thought it a Yang Threat to balance the Microsoft yin of bluster.

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:

If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?
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June 12, 2008

Yahoo! in with Google?

As many of our readers already know, the potential deal between MSN & Yahoo! has already reached room temperature.

But what is this I see on the home page of MSNBC.com? It's an article that not only reiterates MSN losing the deal with Yahoo!, but now Yahoo! is in talks with Google on an advertising partnership agreement!!

Keep an eye on this y'all as I'm sure something will transpire sooner than later.

Yahoo! in with Google?
Posted by sean at 2:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
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May 6, 2008

Yahoo!'s WarningTo End-Users

Here I am on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon doing some searching on Yahoo! (this doesn’t happen too often I might add) and what is this I see???? A WARNING from Yahoo! telling me the following in bolded red letters at the top of page three of the SERP's "1 potentially harmful website is marked on this page." Hmmm...

I began scrolling down the page and find the following immersed in natural search results:

This is the first I've seen of it's kind and have a feeling Yahoo! is setting a new precedence for end-user security when searching their index. Personally, I think its an incredibly valuable tool to at least provide some level of insight to Yahoo! users in terms of end-user security risks when surfing Yahoo! search index and/or providing personal information to sites that may be selling your email, demographic data, etc., to third parties. The tool itself is a Beta product called "SearchScan" which is powered by McAfee. If you scroll over the mid page listing in red, a pop up occurs letting you know specific details on why the listing has been flagged by McAfee as a potentially harmful site to visit.

Brilliant play Yahoo!

My question ultimately is when will Google or MSN follow suit or will the search engines at some point take data like this and just omit these types of sites from their search results entirely?

Yahoo!'s WarningTo End-Users
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May 3, 2008

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer

Just when it seemed the twain might soon be making their way down the aisle, arm-in-arm, the mere spectre of Google is enough to call off the nuptials: Mashable has the goods, including Balmer's e-mail that is really more about Google than Yahoo:

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

He goes on to devote almost half of his e-mail to explaining how bad an idea Yang's Google threat is. I caught this on my Mashable feed as I began watching the original Frankenstein movie with my kids. No kidding.

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer
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March 4, 2008

SEO Success Factors

I was recently asked about the success factors of an SEO campaign. There are many, but let's take a look at three of what we consider the most important success factors:

1) Knowledge Is Power

It's very important for us to know what prior SEO activities have been conducted on a site. This can make or break the campaign. On a few occasions, our team of site analyzers have uncovered controversial techniques that even our client didn't know had been performed!

It's also very important for us to have access and learn from your web site analytics data. SEO is about getting the right people to your site from search engines. Your analytics data prior to SEO and after SEO is a constant gauge to see if your SEO company is traffic-focused, not just placement-focused.

Finally, the knowledge of understanding how your target audience is searching for your offerings allows an SEO best practices firm to shoot for the bullseye where visitors convert, not the outer rings of the target where visitors are "just browsing". Since the early days of SEO, this has not changed.

2) Link Popularity

With the significant weighting of link popularity in Google's algorithm, there are very few sites that can ignore link building. Now crucial to your site's success at major search engines is the continual effort of adding quality, relevant third party links to your site. Trust me, most of your competitors are doing just that.

3) Flexibility To Site Changes

We always make sure to take the temperature of potential clients as to their flexibility to make changes to their site that will make the site more search-engine-friendly. If you are considering SEO, I would suggest you rate your flexibility to site changes on a scale of 1-10. Bottom line, if you are below a 5, you may want to consider Paid Search along with Natural SEO.

SEO Success Factors
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October 19, 2007

Using Yahoo Search Assist for Keyword Research

In addition to using "typical" keyword research tools like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, I frequently pop in to Google Suggest because I appreciate the quick interface and I like the "from the horse's mouth" approach to spotting keyword trends. While Google never really comes out and says it, I think it's defensible to suggest that the listings are ordered based on popularity. Here's a look at a Google Suggest query for [sports]:

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced Yahoo Search Assist, a tool similar to Google Suggest that helps refine and suggest queries based on what other people are searching for. Here is the resulting screen for a Yahoo Search Assist query for [sports]:

You should immediately see a critical difference in how the engines serve the suggestions. Google Suggest displays only those terms that begin with your search term.

Yahoo Search Assist shows terms and phrase that include your terms anywhere in the query. That's a huge improvement, and I hope Google Suggest takes a cue from that feature.

Both Google Suggest and Yahoo Search Assist contain a feature worth noting, and it can throw you if you're not paying attention. Typically, once you complete a word, that word disappears from the list of suggestions, because (I assume) the engine believes you're thinking beyond that single word. Here's a good example. At Yahoo, as you type the word vacation, you see the word vacations in the list of suggested queries:

But as soon as you completely type vacations, that term disappears from the list of suggestions:

As I said before, the same thing happens at Google. So if you typed too quickly, you might think the term "vacations" isn't popular. But nothing is further from the truth. So if you're doing quick, impromptu keyword research at either Google Suggest or Yahoo Search Assist, type slowly, because a lot can happen between keystrokes.

Using Yahoo Search Assist for Keyword Research
Posted by erik at 8:05 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
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September 28, 2007

The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization

In May of this year, Google announced its new Universal Search System which blended traditional search results with news, video, music, images, local and book search engine portals, as well as Blogs on a single page to help users find information with greater ease. Universal Search, a new platform which represents a major shift in information display and retrieval, is causing search engine optimization companies to rethink how they conduct service offerings. So what does this mean for SEO professionals?

For those who conduct Search Engine Optimization services for clients, “Universal Search” is yet another marketing opportunity worth considering. Our industry is already known for dealing with extreme change on a monthly basis, and as a result of being able to adapt to this ever-changing market, this has enabled us to thrive in the industry. With these changes, we must re-invent or enhance our offering to meet the growing changes presented by Google in order to stay ahead of the curve. The emergence of Google’s Universal Search now forces SEO professionals to look outside the box for providing their customers with bleeding edge Internet marketing solutions.

To be able to help our clients rank in the top Google search results, we now have to look towards creating effective SEO strategies that involve RSS, news, videos, audio files, images, local and book search engine portals, and Blogs. With so many new things being displayed in Google’s search results it will be much harder to attain a top ten search engine listings for clients. However, this doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end for SEO’ers. Nevertheless, it means that we must look towards existing Google search platforms and integrate them into a new strategy called “Universal Search Engine Optimization.”

Universal Search Engine Optimization encompasses traditional SEO (on-site & off-site) methodologies as well as combines Web 2.0 marketing tactics, i.e., RSS, Online Optimized Press Releases, Podcasts, Vodcasts, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Social News sites, Image and Book listing optimization, as well as Local Search, that aids clients in gaining a greater market share within Google’s Universal Search results.

The following Internet marketing activities make up a large part of Universal SEO:

"Definitions in parenthesis taken from Wikipedia"

RSS -- “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.”

Online Optimized Press Releases -- Tailoring a company’s news in such a manner to gain greater visibility online through optimizing elements within the press release.

Podcasts -- “A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.”

Vodcasts -- "Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand or video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.”

Blogs -- “Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.”

Social Bookmarking -- “A way for Internet users to store, organize, share, and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.”

Social News Sites -- News aggregation (social network) sites that gain stories from community members online.

Image Optimization -- Effectively optimizing image file names, alternate text, and the utilization of photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, etc.

Book Listing Optimization -- Optimize Book company Web site pages to enhance placement in search engines for the titles of books for sale.

Local Search Listings -- Create local business listings and optimize Web sites to better perform amongst local search engine (Google Local, Yahoo Local, etc) listings.

To stay competitive in the ever-changing SEO industry, we need to create strategies for our clients that focus on all aspects of Universal Search. I believe this new form of search results presented by Google will open many doors for companies seeking to embrace the evolution of search.

The Emergence of Universal Search Engine Optimization
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September 18, 2007

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989

We knew it was coming and we tried to bake a cake for Maureen Dowd more than a Month ago, yet we are still surprised at how search-friendly they are being in their explanation today:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

If you have any doubt that this is the SEO equivalent of 1989 scroll a bit further down the page for this money quote:

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989
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May 8, 2007

SEO Best Practices - International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues

Suggested Best Practices:

A good first question to ask is “Who exactly are we targeting?�? If you are targeting a specific country, targeting a specific language-speaking audience, or your web site copy is specifically for a country or language-specific audience, use a ccTLD (country code top level domain) that relates to your target country rather than a general .com domain. For example, a ccTLD would look like www.domain.fr, www.domain.ca, www.domain.jp, or www.domain.co.uk. Always use ccTLDs for each language of your site.

Avoid having multiple language sites on the same domain, e.g., www.domain.com for English language content and www.domain.com/fr/ for French language content.

Make sure that there is not any duplicate content on your .com and any other sites.

Make sure your pages identify what language they are in, e.g., meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="jp"

If you cannot use a ccTLD, use a subdomain, e.g., fr.domain.com. Google views a subdomain as a separate site.

Benefits Of Best Practices:

A ccTLD communicates to search engines the focus of your site.

A ccTLD is the quickest and most accurate way to communicate regionality to the search engines.

A ccTLD assigns more weight for local search. It allows your site to be more easily included in Google Canada, Google Mexico, etc.

Search engines tend to have higher confidence and often give a ranking boost to a ccTLD site for local searches. For example, Google France may give a more favorable ranking to a France-specific (.fr) site.

FAQ:

Q: What about using subdirectories such as www.domain.com/fr/? Can we do a 301 redirect from a subdirectory to a ccTLD, e.g., from www.domain.com/fr/ to www.domain.fr?

A: From a search engine perspective, it is always best to use a ccTLD. If a ccTLD is not possible, then consider using a subdomain. We do not recommend using subdirectories for international sites or language-specific sites.

Q: What does Google say about the use of TLDs, ccTLDs, subdomains, etc.?

A: “Use TLDs. To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that www.domain.de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.domain.com/de/." (Source: Google Blog)

SEO Best Practices - International or Region-Specific Sites and Domain Issues
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April 13, 2007

Sitemaps Protocol News / SEO Humor

If you've had a backstage pass to the SEO Speedwagon for the last few months, you should know by now that we are official groupies for the Sitemaps Protocol. In fact, if we ever take SEO Speedwagon on tour, Sitemaps Protocol would open up for us.

There actually was some interesting news this week re: the Sitemap Protocol.

1. Ask.com has drank the kool-aid so you can now share your sitemap with them.

2. Although MSN isn't "...ready to consume sitemaps just yet", all three major engines announced the sitemap protocol will now include Autodiscovery.

Autodiscovery allows site owners to add a link to their sitemap within their robots.txt file. Here is what it should look like:

Sitemap: [sitemap URL here]

We highly recommend that you add this line to your robots.txt, especially since you will not have to resubmit your sitemap file when it is updated (which should be often if your site content is dynamic).

If you are a fan of the statistics, etc. provided by Google Webmaster Tools, then also be sure to submit your sitemap there. Along with statistics, you will also be able to see if there are any errors in your sitemap which can be very important, especially for large web sites (trust me.....been there).

SEO Humor:

An SEO guy walks into a bar and asks the bartender, "Can you submit a sitemap to MSN?" The bartender looks at him, scratches his head, and asks, "Why?"

Sitemaps Protocol News / SEO Humor
Posted by doug at 9:10 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
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December 19, 2006

It's Key To Not Remove Yahoo Authentication File

Now that Yahoo has agreed to accept the Sitemap protocol , I've been going through the process of getting client sites authenticated via Yahoo's Site Explorer so we can submit sitemap files.

To be knighted as an authenticated site by Yahoo, you have to create an authentication key file then upload it to the root of your site. Once uploaded, you can request authentication.

We're finding it takes about 24 hours to get the thumbs up or down from Yahoo.

Just a tip for any of you doing the same.....

Once you upload the authentication key file and your site is authenticated, don't remove the authentication key. Yahoo will check periodically for the presence of the key and if it's removed, your site will be unauthenticated.

It's Key To Not Remove Yahoo Authentication File
Posted by doug at 5:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
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December 14, 2006

Direct Links from the Yahoo Directory?

The Yahoo Directory has always shown direct links to the robots. It appears, temporarily anyway, that they are showing them to us, as well . . . in the Directory Listing, anyway, not the Directory Search Results.

Direct Links from the Yahoo Directory?
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November 27, 2006

Evidence of Yahoo Crawling Google Sitemaps

Given Yahoo's recent promise that it would begin to support the Google Sitemaps protocol, it's a bit anti-climactic to document evidence now, but I promised a follow-up.

Back in October, before the "big 3" officially admitted that they would read the same type of sitemap files as a benefit to site owners, I had my suspicions and ran a test to see if and when Yahoo would actually pull a URL from a Google sitemap and add it to the Yahoo index.

I created this orphan page and put it on the blog server. I added the URL to our Google Sitemap file and told Yahoo about the file via the YSE interface. Over Thanksgiving, using a text string query, I noticed that the file had been crawled by Slurp and was now appearing in the main Yahoo index:

Having been too busy to keep a close eye on it that week, I scurried over to YSE to check further and noticed that the file did indeed appear in the list of pages on our blog:

Note that the crawl date for the file - November 16 - is only a day after Yahoo announced its support for the protocol. That's impressive. I submitted the current sitemap file on November 7, and it was processed on the 8th. It's possible that my test file was crawled even before the 16th, since that's only the last crawled date - and I wasn't paying much attention to it during that week.

Regardless, hat's off to Yahoo for making good on their promise - and quickly.

Evidence of Yahoo Crawling Google Sitemaps
Posted by erik at 11:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
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November 6, 2006

An Update on Yahoo Sitemaps Optimization

Reaction to my recent post on optimizing Yahoo sitemaps has been mixed, ranging from "that's amazing" to "you're crazy and your testing methods are shoddy - that will never work!" (thanks for writing, Mom). So I'm trying to take an honest look at the actual probability that Yahoo is able to pull (and subsequently index) URLs found in a Google-style sitemaps file.

The original site I referred to in the post is still showing signs of increased indexing from Yahoo, and the sitemap file I've told Yahoo to use is the same sitemap.xml that I created for Google.

This alone, obviously, does not prove that Yahoo is pulling URLs from the sitemap.xml file. In addition, there are a few other reasons to be skeptical:

• About a month ago, in the YSE forum, the Yahoo rep ("Mr. Slurp") said flat-out, "we currently do not support Google's sitemaps protocol."

  But does that mean that Yahoo can't even open the file, or merely that it doesn't recognize and work with the various tags within the file, such as <.lastmod>, <.changefreq>, <.priority>, etc.?
  

• Following on that point, on the feed submission page, Yahoo says "For any URL (directly submitted or obtained from a feed) our crawler will extract links and find pages we have not discovered already. We will automatically detect updates on pages and remove dead links on an ongoing basis."

  So should this statement not apply to URLs such as www.site.com/sitemap.xml?
  

• When I submitted the sitemap file to Yahoo, it was "processed" within an hour of uploading and gave no indication of error or incompatibility.

  But why should I expect such an error message? Sometimes all you get is an error if the page throws a 404, but little more.

I am currently running some tests that should prove definitively whether Yahoo can (and will) extract URLs from an xml sitemap. It could take a few weeks, but I'll certainly share my results here.

An Update on Yahoo Sitemaps Optimization
Posted by erik at 11:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
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October 31, 2006

Optimizing Sitemaps Feeds for Yahoo

If you're submitting sitemap feeds to Yahoo, consider using the exact same file you use for your Google feeds (often sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz by default).

Until recently, I'd been using another of Yahoo's recommended formats, urllist.txt (due to its minimal file size), but I hadn't been watching the output code as closely as I should have. I'd been exporting the sitemap.xml file directly to urllist.txt.

As it turns out, this can create bloat even in a text file, because (depending on the program you use to create it), your Google sitemap.xml file contains many URLs you might not actually want to be crawled.

To clarify, I create many Google sitemap.xml files and tell Google to "check" but not "crawl" the incidental graphics files (used in design, nav, and so on). But upon export to urllist.txt, my program was simply listing these graphics files in the list to be crawled, just like all html files. That more or less tripled the size of the file, with two-thirds of the content being URLs I didn't even care about.

As a result, I deleted the reference to urllist.txt in Yahoo Site Explorer, and instead told it to fetch sitemap.xml, and within a week, the index count at Yahoo tripled. (Note that we've been working on a few other things for this site too, so I'm not necessarily claiming a 1:1 relationship here. But I know my change didn't hurt.)

Also follow this thread at YSE forums, where later, "Mr. Slurp" offers a user some keen insight into how Yahoo interprets typical "home" pages such as default.htm, etc. I guess the moral of the story is, canonicalization is in the eye of the beholder - never exclude when you can redirect.

Optimizing Sitemaps Feeds for Yahoo
Posted by erik at 11:59 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)
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October 27, 2006

Thanks for the Solid, Danny Sullivan

Some time ago, we asked Danny Sullivan to step up with a solid. We fell kneeward with closed eyes, beseeching Danny to lead us to the pearly gates of Results Page Liberation. Well, we opened our eyes and stretched our legs, and found to our surprise, it is happening!

Yahoo Serp Persecution will soon pass. We must now consider one of the following statements to be an absolute truth:

Either Danny Sullivan heard our prayers and responded accordingly . . .

OR

There is no connection between our call to action copiously supplied with film allusion and the addition of the No Yahoo Directory Tag.

I have to tell you, we're leaning slightly to the former.

Thanks for the Solid, Danny Sullivan
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October 18, 2006

Yahoo Sidles up to Firefox

In a boldly unobtrusive move from its Passive Chap-Hiding Division, Yahoo! has sidled up to Firefox with the following banner:

Using Yahoo! from within the Firefox browser is possible! . . . Who knew?
This has Google wondering what not to do next, as they provide the start page for Firefox users.

Yahoo! plans next to unveil a banner proclaiming that spelling Yahoo on an Etch-a-Sketch is also possible! . . . Who knew?

Yahoo Sidles up to Firefox
Posted by tom at 11:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
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September 18, 2006

The Difference Between Google and Yahoo

We're asked about this all the time, so when I saw the story on the wire this morning that so well symbolized the ideological difference between the two search giants I wanted to make sure to share a few telling highlights with riders on The Wagon.

Now, clients are sick of hearing me repeat, again and again, that Google's product is relevancy. No one has ever heard me say Yahoo's product is relevancy, and I likely will never say it, unless we are suddenly cast into Superman's Bizzaro World.

Such certitude is only aided by ironic ledes like this, from the wire I mention above:

As its rivals create a bigger buzz on the Internet, Yahoo Inc. is hitting television and radio airwaves to remind people that its website remains on the cutting edge of technology and culture.

Cutting edge indeed. At least using telegrams as the delivery vehicle for such a message would have been inspired, rather than accidental, irony. Inspired irony can capture the zeitgeist they are trying to lasso with money, yet spinning that lariat requires one self-aware cowboy, indeed.

The Google antidote, in the same article?:

"Instead of worrying about branding, Google is able to spend time and money on building better algorithms to help people find information and data," said Regis McKenna, who helped steer the marketing campaigns of Apple Computer Inc. and Intel Corp.

Ah, self-awareness. Vive la différence:

As an added promotion, Yahoo will offer coupons for a free cup of coffee at Dunkin' Donuts stores to anyone who sets Yahoo.com as their home page Friday.

What besides a cup of coffeee will get you relevance?

The Difference Between Google and Yahoo
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September 13, 2006

Site Verification Headaches with Yahoo and Google Sitemaps

In the spirit of Doug's most recent post about Google Webmaster Central, I wanted to add a few notes about both it and its Sunnyvale counterpart, Yahoo Site Explorer's recently updated webmaster area.

Yahoo Site Verification. I spent about an hour this morning preparing to verify about 20 sites for a very large client. One thing that's REALLY annoying about Yahoo's site verification process is that each site requires a unique text file - complete with unique filename and unique 16-character text string within the file - uploaded to the root.

Now, of course you can't create all 20 verification files, dump them into an email message, and send them to the client for uploading, because the client won't know what file goes with what site. So I created a folder for each file and zipped all the folders into one Zip archive.

I also added an Excel sheet with columns for the site, filename, and character string, because more than once, I've sent Yahoo authentication files over and over, only to have the recipient complain that the attachment didn't make it through. Apparently, many zealous mail clients look askance at curiously named, 16-byte file attachments. With the Excel file, I had a failsafe record of each verification file's contents in case they needed to be recreated by the client.

I'm sure Yahoo has a reason for giving each user a different authentication filename AND character string for EACH site that needs to be authenticated. I'm just not sure what the reason is.

Contrast this with Google Verification. First, I have to be honest and admit that I'd verified about a half dozen sites through Google before I realized that each time the server spat out an authentication file, it was the exact same file each time. Few people understand that with Google, your unique verification file (tied to your personal Google account) is your backstage pass to any concert you want. You can view the stats for any site that hosts your verification file in its root, and a site can host verfication files for as many people as need access to the stats.

So verify one site, then keep that verification file in a place you'll remember. From then on, you don't need to go through the process of having Google spit out the same info again and again, each time you want to verify a new site. Just upload your file to the root and Verify.

Like Yahoo's verification files, Google's also suffer from Napoleon Complexes - in fact, with no recommended content at all (just unique filenames), email clients are even more suspicious of them, because at 0 bytes, they're infinitely smaller than Yahoo's 16-byte files. While Google doesn't specifically demand that your file contain text, it doesn't discriminate against files that do. So here's a tip: Add some nonsense text to your Google verification file, and I think you'll find it more easily passable through email.

Site Verification Headaches with Yahoo and Google Sitemaps
Posted by erik at 11:34 PM | Comments (29) | TrackBacks (0)
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August 18, 2006

Motion Control At Yahoo! Results

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Yahoo! providing "Also Try" suggestions to the phrase "Motion Control". Back then, Yahoo! felt that I should "Also Try" searching for "Motion Control Shoes" & "Motion Control Running Shoes". What was interesting was that not a single top 30 position had anything to do with running shoes at all in both organic & PPC search results.

It comes to pass today that Yahoo! is now serving up a suggestion for "motion control systems" & "motion control shoes" as "Also Try" options for the phrase "motion control". What happened since two weeks ago that caused Yahoo! to have a change of heart on their also try suggestions? Not sure, but perhaps they have altered their search phrase suggestions to be more in-line with their organic & PPC search results.

It’s nice to see Yahoo! making little tweaks like this to be more focused on relevancy-type keyword phrase suggestions and ultimately creating a better end-user environment for their searchers.

Motion Control At Yahoo! Results
Posted by sean at 10:51 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
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August 10, 2006

Yahoo Redirects Site: Queries to YSE

Sometime in the last 10 hours or so, Yahoo started redirecting users (this user, at least) from search.yahoo.com to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com when used on conjunction with a site: query at the search box:

One possible reason for this is that as I mentioned yesterday, Yahoo has really been beefing up its Site Explorer area, and it's the ideal place to run such queries.

Another reason might be to help balance the server load, although I doubt that site: queries are a serious threat to the Yahoo server farm.

In a somewhat related move, Yahoo seems to have phased out the sitedomain: command - both from a regular search box and from YSE. Is this new? I typically use site: at Yahoo, so this could have happened some time ago.

UPDATE: It looks like others (including SEW) noticed this in testing a few weeks ago. It does appear, however, that today marks more widespread implementation, as the Yahoo Search Blog has just posted a description of what sorts of queries do and do not get redirected.

Yahoo Redirects Site: Queries to YSE
Posted by erik at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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August 4, 2006

Motion Control At Yahoo! = Running Shoes?

I Don't get it. I went to Yahoo! to check on a position for a client involved in Motion Control . What did I find you ask? Yahoo! thinks I should also try looking for Motion Control Running Shoes? Are you kidding me? The entire first page of results (PPC included) doesn't have one search engine result dealing with running shoes in any way, shape or form. As a matter of fact, the entire first 3 SERPs have no indication of dealing with shoes or running shoes at all.

The question is; why does Yahoo! think an end-user that types in "motion control" is more than likely to be actually looking for "motion control shoes" or "motion control running shoes"? Well, not sure what the answer to this question is other than motion control running shoes is pretty popular these days?

Heres a solution for Yahoo! and perhaps other search engines as well- Before you recommend long-tail keyword phrases to semi-broad keyword phrases, check your own top 30 positions in both Organic search and PPC search results prior to giving "Also Try:" suggestions. The organic search results and PPC ads will say a lot in terms of relative keyword phrase extensions that would truly be relevant for end-users to also try searching with at your engine. It makes perfectly good sense to me.

Thoughts, anyone?

Motion Control At Yahoo! = Running Shoes?
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July 20, 2006

How About One More Solid, Danny Sullivan?

As we recently celebrated the liberation of the results page from ODP oppression, I couldn't help but think of a lesser-publicized instance of serp injustice.

It's the same ole story. Site owner forks out $300 and puts together a spotless title, description, and category recommendation for the Yahoo Directory submission. A week later, the site is accepted, but a few changes to the submission are apparent, namely the title, description, and category recommendation. Oh Well, right? The site is in the best directory there is. That's good enough. Site owner thinks, "Sometimes you just gotta say 'What the F@$%!"

Then site owner notices this Yahoo Directory title, which is simply his url, now occupies the spot formerly held by his most glamorous Yahoo result. Site owner thinks of the difference in clickability, and it is that, more than anything, that leads to his drinking problem.

Repeated requests for an update receive as much attention as a new Chevy Chase movie, and that's when site owner remembers that he paid $300 for this treatment! At that point, site owner goes to the window, opens it and sticks his head out and yells, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

So Danny Sullivan, please do us one more solid. Be mad as hell with us. Champion NoYahoo as you did NOODP, cause, uh, no-one's gonna really be free until serp persecution ends.

How About One More Solid, Danny Sullivan?
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July 7, 2006

Yahoo! Knows What Time It Is

Being in sales, it's important to know what time zone your clients and prospects are in for appropriate timing on calls. With so many cities/states broken up into separate time zones, it can be somewhat difficult to determine what time zone they’re in for calling.

Let’s face it, you don’t want to call someone @ 8:00AM Eastern when they’re on Pacific time. So, what can you do to avoid those awkward phone calls to Pacific timers @ 5:00 AM? Well...let’s see what the search engines have to say.

Lets take a look shall we.

Google doesn't know what time it is:
http://www.google.com/search?q=provo+utah+time+zone&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

MSN doesn’t know either:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=provo+utah+time+zone&sourceid=Mozilla-search

Yahoo! knows what time it is! Check it:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=provo+utah+time+zone&ei=UTF-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&fr=moz2

From what I can tell, Yahoo! is the only SE that will show you straight up what time zone a particular city/state is in and to boot, they’ll show you exactly what time it is for your time zone search in real-time! Yahoo! does this without having to have the end-user click on listings to find it unlike Google and MSN!

It’s cool tools like this that keep me from making mistakes on calling people waaaay too early and also helps distinguish one search engine from another in terms of unique tools.

Yahoo! gets a nod on this one for sure.

Yahoo! Knows What Time It Is
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June 29, 2006

Bueller?... Bueller?... Google?... Google?...

This Speedwagon Presentation of Great 80's Moments in Film has been made possible by Peculiar Google Results.

Economics Teacher: Bueller?... Bueller?...

Simone: He's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

Economics Teacher: Thank you, Simone. Google?... Google?...

Simone: Oh. My sister's boyfriend's brother's best friend's girlfriend heard from this kid who knows this girl who's going with a guy who saw Google pass-out after searching for just 3 therapy products last night. I guess Yahoo took over at that point.

Economics Teacher: Thank you, Simone.

Simone: No problem whatsoever.

Economics Teacher: MSN?... MSN?...

Simone: I totally don't think MSN is in this class.

. . . And Scene.

Special thanks to Sean Bolton for discovering this peculiar Google result and to Ben Stein and Kristy Swanson for reprising their roles as Economics Teacher and Simone, respectively.

Bueller?... Bueller?... Google?... Google?...
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June 1, 2006

Maybe There's Something To Google

I'm starting to think maybe Google is on to something. It's still pretty early in the game, but this new search engine is pretty darn good. Not only does it appear to be offering more accurate results than the others, but it gives you more accurate information without having to click.

I know these are new concepts, so just bear with me. Let's take last weekend's race in Indianapolis. Lots of people seem to be interested in that event, so there's probably lots of information across the world wide web about it. And the race just happened, so it would be pretty impressive if these search engines could already give us information about this current event. I'm not interested in visiting any sites right now, but I'd like to see which search engine would be able to tell me who won that race. See, I think in the future people will not just use search engines to find web sites, but to find information in a hurry.

Anyway, who was the [2006 Indianapolis 500 Winner]?

Google's Answer:

And the other guys:

Google has my answer above the fold (twice). Yahoo came up with the answer further down the page (6th result), and MSN did not show the winner anywhere on the first page.

Like I said, maybe there's something to this Google!

Maybe There's Something To Google
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May 15, 2006

Meet the New Yahoo, Same as the Old Yahoo

A look at the new Yahoo, which, according to ABC News we won't begin to see regularly for a few Months, makes me wonder aloud: if they wouldn't have said anything, would anyone have noticed?

Perhaps it was this talking point which had me expecting a new revolution in a search homepage:

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo regards the latest changes as the most dramatic renovations made to its front page since the site's 1994 debut as a bare-bones directory developed by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo.

I'd say the movement from the 1996 Yahoo to the 2000 Yahoo was a far bigger leap, not to mention 2002 or the sea change of 2003. In fact, 2004, 2005, and current look a lot more like the new Yahoo heralded above as the most dramatic renovations since inception.

All of which goes to show you: with a Wayback Machine a hyperbolic talking point can be popped as easily as a balloon.

Meet the New Yahoo, Same as the Old Yahoo
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March 30, 2006

Wagon's Final Date With March Madness 2006

After a humbling 2-2 last week, the Wagon has decided to pull the plug on the Texas Update to the March Madness Algorithm. To those who bet the house based on our predictions, we will soon be opening shelters throughout the country.. Already being called the George Mason Update, our most recent dance number is guaranteed to finally get it right! That being said, please gamble at your own risk.

The March Madness Algorithm now takes the number of Yahoo backlinks pointing to the Athletic Department and divides that by student enrollment.

LSU (21,100 links / 30,564 students = .687) loses to UCLA (36,400 links / 38,000 students = .958)

George Mason (201 links / 29,728 students = .007) loses to Florida (73,400 links / 49,693 students = 1.48)

... and then Florida takes the 2006 NCAA National Championship!

This will be the last March Madness post until next season, unless of course we ace the finals, in which case you can expect to see a press release, merchandising, and a low budget film starring C. Thomas Howell.

Wagon's Final Date With March Madness 2006
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February 17, 2006

Yahoo! site index count

This is a recent discovery of mine, but perhaps not new to some of my co-workers and peers. I just recently noticed that Yahoo! now allows for webmasters to check their total page index count @ Yahoo! with the same operators that have always worked at MSN & Google: [site:www.yahoo.com]. It used to be that in order for anyone to check Yahoo!, they had to search by [domain:www.yahoo.com]. Yahoo!'s old way still works, but I like the fact they have followed the same advanced search functionality as MSN and Google. It certainly makes for checking total pages indexed at the search engines simple for all of the "Big 3".

The way to check Link Popularity @ Yahoo! still remains the same however. One still needs to check link popularity @ Yahoo! by doing the search [linkdomain:www.yahoo.com]. Perhaps at some point soon, Yahoo! will transition this advanced search functionality for checking link juice to the way MSN and Google do it: [link:www.yahoo.com]. Time will tell.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Yahoo! site index count
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February 15, 2006

An Open Letter to Search Engines

Dear Search Engines,

Here's a word for you: Relevance. I know you have it. And I know you know people want it. But here's some difficult news. They're not getting it, because you're making it too hard for them.

I know, I know. You're trying to get the word out. You have "advanced search" pages. You have APIs. You have tabbed searches for tiered results. You have these and a ton of other features that NO ONE USES, because despite more-or-less-accurate fantasies about how important you are to the world, you refuse to understand that people, while not exactly stupid, aren't exactly as "search literate" as you need them to be.

What's that, Google? You say you're getting the word out in the world's 8th most popular blog? I'm sorry, I guess I had trouble hearing that over the din of NO ONE KNOWING WHAT A BLOG IS. That's like saying your brand of calculator is the most popular among Hyperbolic Topology Ph.D. candidates. Woohoo!

Part of this isn't your fault; it's ours. We fill your comments and trackback sections. We write article after article about search engines. We spend days telling you what we think about preferential treatment of subdomains, or the mishandling of 302s, or how to measure effectiveness of site-wide links, and you start to believe that we represent a significant portion of potential users (we don't). Even the dreaded MSM is jumping in - a sure sign of the social dissemination of your technology, right? You can't even wend your way to the Times Op/Ed section without seeing half a dozen articles about how cool search is. But don't be misled: Most of these articles are mind-numbingly shallow, and they're mostly read by people who know thrice as much as the authors themselves. Not a lot of additional reach there, unfortunately.

Here's the bottom line. The most popular searches in your very own search boxes are actual URLs. Did you hear that? PEOPLE SEARCH FOR URLs IN YOUR SEARCH FIELDS SO THEY CAN SEE THEM IN YOUR SERPs AND THEN CLICK ON THEM. Does this sound like a group of people who are looking for a way to restrict search results to a specific TLD or find out how much they weigh in a popular British/Irish format? (By the way, would you call that "13 stone 8"?)

Search engines, here is the brutal reality: you're trying to get your message out in a world where 17% of HDTV owners mistakenly believe they're watching a high-def broadcast simply because they own a high-definition television. What's the moral here? YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS STUFF TOO SIMPLE FOR PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND.

• Spend less time posting to your official blogs and more time putting your message on tray liners at fast-food restaurants.
• Spend less time speaking at tech conferences and more time buying a few TV spots to showcase your features. (When people see something on TV, they want to try it. When they see a tiny link to it pulling them away from a comfortable place, they don't. Pontiac should not understand this more than you do, but it does.
• Spend less time catering to corrupt governments and more time creating ad inserts for Sports Illustrated or Parenting or Marie Claire or whatever publications target the users who aren't fully exploiting your capabilities. Trust me, that's just about all of them.

Your employees have spent a lot of their time creating some very cool search features. It's time that some of them spent their hours thinking of innovative ways to educate searchers. And remember, counter to your intuition, "innovative" means "less technical." Users who know how to use search engines correctly better understand engines' potential for solving problems and are even more likely to associate specific engines with relevant results. And the managerial subset of that group will really understand how important it is to have a viable search engine presence. When that happens, everybody wins.

An Open Letter to Search Engines
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January 24, 2006

Yahoo at Number 2: Strategy or Surrender?

It's probably an understatement to say that Susan Decker has had better weeks. Yahoo's Chief Financial Officer likely wasn't too happy that even though revenues increased 39% from last year, the company's stock dropped 13% when earnings fell short of forecast by one cent.

But that was just the beginning. In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article earlier today, Decker more or less condeded the battle for search market share to Google.

So in case you still haven't read it, here is Decker's money quote:

We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google. It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.

It's been the buzz all day long, and very few of the many stories have been favorable.

First, I'm with Microsoft's Scoble in wondering whether "Yahoo’s CFO gave a quote that’s now being used out of context."

Second, what would we prefer she have said? Last week's search engine market share numbers tell the story: Yahoo is Number Two (and very good at it, as Greg Boser might say). Right now, it has very little hope of beating Google, and very little worry of losing to MSN. (And don't expect those numbers to move much. Check Danny's 2005 timeline - how's that for stasis?)

Would search enthusiasts (or "the Street") have been happier with a little chest-thumping like Microsoft's Steve Ballmer did last summer, promising to match Google's relevancy in "six months"? Here's a quick history lecture. No one believed it then, and six-and-a-half months later, no one believes it now. Will any loyal Yahoo Search users actually abandon Yahoo because of this? (Common sense says no, but there's no accounting for media bloggers.)

Third, does Yahoo even consider search its top priority? Search is an integral part of its list of services, but its groups, news, email, and many other services make it one of the world's biggest brands. To paraphrase one comment at Scoble's blog, a pure search engine like Google sends you away, and a portal like Yahoo sucks you in. Some people make reasoned arguments that Google could take a lesson from Yahoo's model and re-allocate some eggs into alternative, revenue-bearing baskets.

UPDATE: Here's a passionate response from Qi Lu and Eckart Walther, both VPs of Yahoo Search.

Yahoo at Number 2: Strategy or Surrender?
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January 18, 2006

New Search Engine Market Share, Popular Search Terms Announced

Via Search Engine Watch, we find that Nielsen//Netratings has just released (PDF) November tallies for search engine market share and most popular search terms, as of November 2005. Without further ado:

Search Engine Market Share, November 2005

Engine	Share %	Total Searches (x1000)
Google	46.3	2,365,998
Yahoo	25.4	1,194,519
MSN	11.4	583,304
AOL	6.9	350,899
MyWay	2.5	129,555
Ask Jeeves	2.3	119,679
Earthlink	.6	32,172
Dogpile	.6	31,563
Netscape	.6	30,434
iWon	.5	27,670

source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, January 2006

My initial thoughts here are that while the top three engines more or less maintained their share, Google's growing involvement with and potential influence over AOL could do real damage to Y and M and cause fewer and fewer people to believe it's still anyone's game. (And believing may be all it takes, as John suggested on Monday.)

In addition to the search engine market share numbers, N//N also released the top 10 search terms for November:

Top Search Queries for November, 2005 (US)

Search Term	Total Queries
"ebay"	13,871,000
"google"	13,301,000
"yahoo"	7,997,000
"mapquest"	7,431,000
"yahoo.com"	6,528,000
"pogo.com"	4,062,000
"walmart"	3,688,000
"ask jeeves"	3,389,000
"msn"	3,166,000
"ebay.com"	3,125,000

source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, January 2006

I guess I shouldn't always be so shocked at the number of people who use the Search box to type full or partial URLs.

Ken Cassar, chief analyst for Nielsen//NetRatings, had an interesting analysis of this segment (my emphasis added):

"There are two types of online searchers that type a Web site’s URL into a search engine rather than into the browser’s address bar: Those inexperienced enough not to appreciate the difference between the two, and those that are so experienced they have become habituated to using the search engine as their portal to the Internet.

Try as I might, I'm not sure I will ever buy the last part of that. It's like saying that I'm pushing my car down the street because I'm too savvy to drive it. I believe that truly savvy users have come to view the browser - not the search engine - as the portal to the Internet.

But Cassar ends with a note we can all live with:

Whether this behavior is driven by ignorance or savvy, the end result is the same: The search engine is the focal point of the online experience for Internet users across the spectrum.

Amen to that.

New Search Engine Market Share, Popular Search Terms Announced
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January 11, 2006

Same Subdomain Results in SERPs: What is Excessive?

Sean asked me how long Yahoo had been positioning more than two URLs from a given subdomain on its SERPs, and I didn't have a good answer.

In the Yahoo query for [apple], for example, eight of the ten results come from the www subdomain of apple.com. There's little doubt that Apple has earned a top placement for that search, but I believe that relevance is questionable when the algorithm shows links to the French, Japanese, and German home pages as well, from a computer with a US IP address, set to default English.

(And I'm not trying to be Americentric. If I were German, searching from www.yahoo.de, I wouldn't want a bunch of English-language results either.)

Where are the trade mags devoted to Apple technology? The blogs? The Apple section of Slashdot is the only non-apple.com URL listed. Is that enough?

MSN is similar, but with different apple.com URLs from the www subdomain. The only non-apple.com page is the Wikipedia page for Apple.

It's not confined to Apple. Try searches for other major brands and see what comes up.

Typically, Google doesn't place more than two pages from any given subdomain on one SERP. (You could argue, though, that there's little difference between Yahoo showing more than two instances of one subdomain and Google's habit of showing up to two instances per subdomain, but from multiple subdomains.) While I know that no single engine dictates the gold standard for "mix" of domains on a results page, I have become accustomed to Google's ratio. I'm not saying there's a right and wrong ratio, but the Yahoo/MSN situation seems unbalanced. What do you think?

Same Subdomain Results in SERPs: What is Excessive?
Posted by erik at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
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January 9, 2006

Historical Search Traffic - Are You Missing The Boat?

In my last post, I asked the question: "Is your Search Traffic growing Big Time?"

Notice I didn't ask, "Are your search engine placements growing Big Time?" Why? Because your search engine placements are just a means to an end for what you should really be seeking ... target audience visits clicking through to your site from your search engine placements.

If you're not analyzing your search engine traffic at least monthly, the boat has left the dock without you. Make sure you have a web analytics program that provides search engine referrer data. This way you will always know exactly how many visitors find your site through each search engine. Then meticulously track your Search Traffic at least monthly over the long haul.

Here's an example from a client who fits my "7 Characteristics Of Companies That Have Committed To Ongoing SEO". Let's take a look at their Search Traffic for Google, Yahoo, and MSN in 2005:

If you're analyzing your Search Traffic monthly, then you have the advantage of being able to compare it to prior years. Here's what this client's search traffic looked like the prior year (2004):

Now let's go back another year and look at 2003:

There are many observations that can be made from analyzing three years of historical search traffic. Here are just a few:

* Google brings significantly more visitors to this site than Yahoo and MSN. In fact, currently Google traffic is approximately the equivalent of Yahoo and MSN combined.

* Since January 2003, traffic from Google has grown from under 50,000 to nearly 800,000 monthly visitors.

* This client definitely has a seasonal trend to it's Search Traffic with small decreases in search traffic in January and February that recover in March and April, flatten our over the early part of the Summer, then take off in the Fall and reach their peak in December.

The analysis and observations can go on and on. My main point is that we can use this data to make significant strategic decisions about our SEO efforts. And our client can use it to make meaningful e-business decisions that affect their bottom line.

Every site owner should be analyzing their Search Traffic and using whatever intelligence this brings to the table. Be happy about good search engine placements, but be excited about Search Traffic that is growing big time!

Historical Search Traffic - Are You Missing The Boat?
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December 19, 2005

You Think Your Keywords Are Competitive?

List fanatics love the last few weeks of every calendar year. Search engine freaks are no exception, because that's when engines release their top searches of that year.

Yahoo and Lycos are the first to make their announcements. Following are their Top 10 searches of 2005. (Please check out the sites too, because they sub-categorize searches and show some very interesting data.)

Yahoo Top 10 for 2005:

1. Britney Spears
2. 50 Cent
3. Cartoon Network
4. Mariah Carey
5. Green Day
6. Jessica Simpson
7. Paris Hilton
8. Eminem
9. Ciara
10. Lindsay Lohan

What did you expect? "How to be a good citizen"? "Best foreign films"? Grow up.

Lycos Top 10 for 2005:

1. Paris Hilton
2. Pamela Anderson
3. Britney Spears
4. Poker
5. Dragonball
6. Jennifer Lopez
7. WWE
8. Pokemon
9. Playstation
10. Hurricane Katrina

Just to show you how far we've (not) come in six years, following are the Top 10 Lycos searches for 1999. The more things change...

1. Pokemon
   
2. Britney Spears
   
3. WWF
   
4. Dragonball Z
   
5. Pamela Anderson
   
6. Star Wars
   
7. Backstreet Boys
   
8. Poetry
   
9. Halloween
   
10. Blair Witch Project

That's right. A full 50% of the top 10 terms from 1999 are still in the top 10 six years later. (This assumes we can call [WWF] and [WWE] the same term. If not, I'm afraid I'll have to hit you with a folding chair.)

FYI, [Y2K] was #20 in CY99.

I'm hoping that Google Zeitgeist will release some interesting lists in the next week or so as well. "Stay tuned," as they said long, long ago.

You Think Your Keywords Are Competitive?
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December 12, 2005

A PPC Manager’s Christmas Wish List

Tis the season for Santa to deliver his gifts to kids young and old across the globe and I for one am willing to admit that I’m just a big kid at heart. So Search Engine Santa, here’s one humble PPC Manager’s Christmas wish list.

1. A Google desktop API that will allow me to monitor my PPC campaigns in real time. {Hint: A lot like the one they’ve got for AdSense users}.
2. For Yahoo to get rid of the archaic random image input at login.
3. For Yahoo to allow us to combine all of our accounts into one central place instead of having to log in and out for each account.
4. More computing platforms for Google so they can meet the demand for Analytics requests.

As you can see my list is short because I don’t want to be greedy and get any virtual coal in my inbox this Christmas. But these are a few of the things that I run across on a daily basis that would sure make great Christmas presents from Search Engine Santa.

I am collecting “wish lists� from others to give to Search Engine Santa and would be happy to deliver yours with mine. Feel free to contribute to the list by adding your comment to this post.

A PPC Manager’s Christmas Wish List
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December 7, 2005

Yahoo Site Explorer Enhances Backlink Feature

The Yahoo Search Blog announced enhancements to the Yahoo Site Explorer yesterday that make your backlink searches more efficient than ever.

The interface now allows you to filter your backlinks (Yahoo calls them "inlinks") so that your own domain does not appear in the list:

• Select Except from this domain to filter out your top-level domain, along with all subdomains on that domain.
• Select Except from this subdomain to filter out only your specific subdomain. For example, if you have a blog on the blogspot.com domain, selecting this option will show links from other blogspot.com blogs, but not your own.

Like always, Yahoo shows incoming links even if they contain the "nofollow" attribute. This underscores the point that the nofollow link attribute is quite different from the nofollow command in the robots meta tag. Links that contain the nofollow attribute are recognized as links and crawled just as any other link. They're simply not offering an authoritative "vote" that might help the recipient site's rankings.

Yahoo Site Explorer Enhances Backlink Feature
Posted by erik at 12:46 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)
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November 7, 2005

Yahoo or Yahwho?

In my research for last week's post, as well as this week's post, I have been struck by how much of a "business" the search engines really are. Oh they try and put a different face on things, but in reality they are clawing and scratching for market share just like the search results for Britney Spears. Why? Because of money and power, but I'll save that for another post.

I steered away from digging into numbers in last weeks post and will follow suit this week. Numbers, surprisingly as it may seem, can show an awful lot about what anyone cares about, whether it's a person or a company. (What would your spending reveal about you…) But for the sake of time and not wanting to bore myself as well as you the reader, I'll focus on information, not necessarily numbers.

I came across an excellent article from James Fallows in the New York Times about Yahoo and where they are going as a company. They mentioned several ways in which they are different from their main competitor, Google, and ways that they want to leverage their strengths to remain strong in their industry.

Yahoo seems to be focusing in on becoming small-minded. What I mean by this is they see the online future as smaller social networks where friends share reviews, advice, etc. This is a logical step for them as they have a great stronghold in user groups, forums, shopping, etc. Their "portal" approach has won millions of fans and thus ensuring that Yahoo will never become Yahwho?

Now for some numbers, sort of. Yahoo was one of the few companies to survive the dot-com bubble bursting. Looking at their historical stock chart is almost like looking at a histogram of the dot.com era. Currently, Yahoo's stock price ($37.65) is a tenth of Google's ($394.80). Does this mean anything significant; your guess is as good as mine. Suffice to say that investors love innovation and until Yahoo starts beating Google to the punch on innovative add-ons that attract new users (as opposed to further hooking the existing ones) the price difference will probably be significant.

In conclusion I am becoming more and more convinced that just as we've had "The Big Three" auto companies in the past, we're moving towards an awareness of a similar convergence in the search market. I guess it will be up to us to determine what bells and whistles we want with our search that will determine whom we favor.

Yahoo or Yahwho?
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November 2, 2005

Yahoo Announces Algo Update

Tim Mayer at Yahoo announced a new weather report late last night:

We will be making changes to the ranking of our index tonight. I would expect that this update will be mild and quick compared to recent ones but will impact the ranking of some sites.

So keep an eye on your Yahoo SERPs.

As an aside, we applaud the glasnost of the Weather Report concept, as pioneered by Yahoo. Google obviously agrees, since Matt Cutts has also been very good lately at mapping out the rollouts of Google algo updates. It appears the major engines have decided (rightly) that announcing updates ahead of time helps webmaster relations and PR (public relations, silly) far more than it compromises any sort of corporate secrecy.

Yahoo Announces Algo Update
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October 28, 2005

The Search Engine Hot Dog Derby

I've always wondered why Major League Baseball teams can't come up with better between-inning entertainment for fans. Each Spring and Summer I spend a lot of time at Jacob's Field in Cleveland and even the folks that organize the breaks in action for my beloved Tribe bat about .125 in the entertainment category.

But rather than focus on the negative, I must tip my cap for the Kiss Cam where random, generally unsuspecting couples are selected and urged to smooch. At least watching the awkwardness between complete strangers who are being coerced by thousands, nearly obligated to kiss is interesting and somewhat entertaining.

Beyond the tip of the cap, I tip my cap and dramatically salute the Hot Dog Derby! I'm not sure exactly why the hot dog derby is so fun. Perhaps it's just me, but there's something exhilarating about three hot dogs up on a huge LCD screen racing around the bases - one with ketchup, one with mustard, and one with onion.

As derby announcer Frank Furter calls the race, the fans go wild picking a dog and urging it on, hopefully, to a victory. Some people I know, not me of course, have been known to call out, "Run Mustard Run!", "Onion Sucks!", and various other wiener chants. No one seems to care that it's just a computer program with a predetermined winner.

So I'm sitting on a plane heading to L.A. and my mind wanders to my place of tranquility, Jacob's Field, where I'm enjoying the hot dog derby. I guess it was the transition from there to listening to Danny Sullivan's Daily SearchCast that made me realize that the search engine race between Google, Yahoo, and MSN is a lot like the hot dog derby.

In the Search Engine Marketing business, especially those of us that were bit by the SEO bug back in the 90's (a.k.a., the old folks), we're constantly watching, intensely monitoring ... weekly, daily, even by the minute ... this race between the search engines. We can be a bit like search engine paparazzi or search engine groupies.

Let's take this one step further. C'mon. Oblige me...

Google is definitely the dog with Ketchup. Ketchup has an impressive track record, is the fan favorite, is almost always out in front and wins consistently. It’s name alone is in the Brand Eponym Hall of Fame with the likes of Kleenex, Xerox, Coke, and Band-Aid.

Yahoo is definitely covered in Mustard. A tenured dog with a loyal fan base, if Yahoo buys AOL, it becomes Spicy Brown.

MSN is the dog smothered in Onion. Leaky eyed fans of this dog rarely select it without Ketchup or Mustard. Certainly the "underdog", I must admit I have a hard time not rooting for Onion -- which comes natural to an Indians fan.

So who's your dog?

I find myself still using 'ole reliable Ketchup, but recently I've found myself sampling more Mustard and some occasional Onion.

And who ultimately wins this derby?

None of our three main Condiments are going away anytime soon. And who knows, 2006 may be the year Relish joins the race. Likely, no one wins all the customers in the end. We'll just stay right here on the edges of our seats enjoying the race.

"Go Onion!"

The Search Engine Hot Dog Derby
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October 12, 2005

A Universal Truth from Yahoo Site Explorer

In preparation for my earlier post describing Yahoo Site Explorer, I was playing around with some random domains that were sure to be well indexed by Yahoo, and I came across something quite interesting. It's far too late in the day to try to interpret it, but here it is:

Needless to say, that was one URL worth exploring. Some observations and questions:

• That specific URL is the only one in the YSE index for the whitehouse.gov root page. If you explore the URL without the anchor, the SERP reverts back to the anchor-containing address.
• Obviously, that anchor doesn't appear in the current or cached version of the White House home page.
• What is the intent here - some sort of post-modern engine bomb? While I found it via Yahoo, that doesn't mean it was intended to affect Yahoo SERPs.
• The inlink page for that URL shows some interesting variety: search results pages, blogs, wiki scrapers...
• Could this be spread via some sort of PPC scraping? No funky anchor text appears to accompany the inlinks; they often use the title of the whitehouse.gov root page, "Welcome to the White House."
• What is the desired effect? If its purpose is to distort SERPs, it doesn't appear to be working, at least not yet.

Feel free to fill in the blanks, even to the point of telling me that I missed an important memo about the latest link prank.

A Universal Truth from Yahoo Site Explorer
Posted by erik at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)
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Diagnosing Crawling and Indexing Issues with Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo recently released the Yahoo Site Explorer, a very helpful way to diagnose issues that may be hampering your performance in Yahoo natural search.

Enter a URL in the Search box, and Yahoo returns two values: First, the number of indexed pages for a given site, and as a second option, the number of incoming links pointing at that site. The following image shows the location of the key data points.

Drilling down, you can select specific URLs from the results page, and "explore" those pages in depth - finding, for example, the number of pages from a specific section of your site that have been indexed, or the incoming links pointing to a specific page of your site. To find an index count for a specific site section, enter or click a URL such as http://www.site.com/press/. This returns indexing and linking results for this specific URL, as well as any pages in the /press/ directory.

Unlike Google, which purposely returns only a percentage of a site's incoming links, Yahoo Site Explorer claims to show all incoming links that it knows about. This can come in very handy when performing a competitive link analysis for sites in your industry.

One of Site Explorer's largest drawbacks is the ability to download only the first 50 results into TSV format, for import into programs like Excel. It would be wonderful to have an entire site's worth of data to sort and play with in a spreadsheet program, but it's unlikely that Yahoo is too eager to spend processing time creating TSV files with tens of thousands of rows. A resourceful programmer named John Mueller has used the Yahoo Search API to create a custom version of Yahoo Site Explorer that overcomes some of these common obstacles; it's worth a look.

If you find large blocks of URLs from your site that Yahoo has not indexed, it offers a submission system similar to that of Google Sitemaps. You can simply fill a text file (such as pages.txt) with the URLs you want Yahoo to index, separated by a hard return. Upload the text file to your web server, then submit the entire URL of the text file (such as http://www.site.com/pages.txt) to the Yahoo Free Submit page.

We don't yet have significant data on the crawl rate for URLs submitted via this method, but we'll be sure to publish any information we collect.

Diagnosing Crawling and Indexing Issues with Yahoo Site Explorer
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September 20, 2005

AOL/MSN vs. Google and Yahoo?

The Associated Press today is reporting that MSN and Time Warner (AOL) are in discussions about a potential partnership "...that would help the two companies better compete against rivals Google and Yahoo".

Also, "...one aspect of the talks centered on using Microsoft's new MSN search engine on AOL, replacing AOL's current relationship with Google."

It is certainly interesting to hear about these two (formerly?) bitter rivals talking about becoming partners in the battle against the big boys, Yahoo and Google.

We'll have more to say about this if the partnership looks like it will become a reality.

AOL/MSN vs. Google and Yahoo?
Posted by doug at 12:29 PM | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)
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August 17, 2005

Yahoo Gives Coke a Second Chance

I recently discussed how Google gives Coca-Cola a pass by offering the top four SERP slots to the exact same content, for the simple query [coke].

To prove I'm not picking on Google, I wanted to show how the other big engines treat the same query, and it's Yahoo's turn. To be honest, I expected similar results from Yahoo, but they surprised me with an interesting twist.

Through the first three results of a search for [coke], things are going fine. coca-cola.com, then the Coke Music site, followed by Diet Coke. No real surprises. But then we hit the fourth result. Notice anything familiar about it?

You should. It's exactly the same as the first result. Exactly the same. Same title, same description (taken from the Yahoo Directory, which misspells the company name, of all things), same Yahoo Directory category, and the same destination site.

This is surely a glitch, one I haven't seen before (with little or big brands, for that matter). I won't speculate on the cause without further investigation, but I'm quite eager to try to reproduce this effect with other queries, and I'm very curious about how it affects clickthrough.

Coke, if you want to share some clickthrough data with me, I'm all ears. And I promise not to refer to you as Coco-Cola.

Yahoo Gives Coke a Second Chance
Posted by erik at 6:25 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)
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