Yahoo No Directory Tag Due in January 2007

Search Engine Roundtable reported this morning that Yahoo will be implementing a "No Yahoo Directory" Tag in their directory listings, hopefully in January.  This means that the traditional Yahoo Directory title that appears in directory submissions will not appear in standard search results and your traditional HTML browser title information should appear.  This comes on the heels of an announcement in October regarding a "NoODP" tag, which supported the removal the ODP Titles from Yahoo search results.

The core benefit to this is in the fact that webmasters and marketers will have more control of the messaging that appears in Yahoo search results, by way of the HTML title.  Proper messaging in the HTML title tag can help in a variety of ways, including:

• Better brand awareness and website association - having your brand/company name at the end or beginning of the HTML title helps enforce your name with the associated keyword
• Better click thru - research suggests that users searching specific keywords are more applicable to click results that have the keyword directly in the search title.  In addition, when the keyword is found in the search result, the keyword is presented in bold, adding additional relevance and support for clicking the result(s).

Up till now, variables in the Yahoo search algorithm enabled Yahoo Directory titles to appear in search results in place of the strategic HTML Title. If the title did not contain the proper messaging as related to the keyword search (Yahoo Directory submissions frequently only contain the company names), then searches may be less likely to click the given result.

Here is the current forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. 

Is Google Using Santa as "Updatebait"?

In the SEM industry we have been hearing a lot about the term “linkbait”.  What is the definition of linkbaiting? What makes a good linkbait?  Why is one topic more “link worthy” than another?  While there has been a lot of discussion as to what linkbaiting really consists of, it basically comes down to more people linking to your site because of something you create/post. 

Is it possible that Google has come up with such a thing as an “updatebait”?

Okay it sounds a little silly, but it seems Google has found a clever way to get users to upgrade to Google Earth Version 4.  And who better to help them with it than jolly old Saint Nick himself? 

For the past couple of years people have been able to watch Santa make his famous journey on Christmas Eve using Google Earth.  By simply downloading the Santa Tracker, you could sit at your computer and follow Santa on his magical sleigh ride.  If you were lucky and behaved all year, he might even stop at your house (ok I made that part up). 

This year Google has taken that tactic and expanded it.  Not only can you watch Santa fly around the world on Christmas Eve, but you can visit the 3D North Pole and search the Earth for the twelve presents he has hidden each day leading up to Christmas.  The kids can have fun looking at the reindeer and finding Santa’s gifts all while learning at the same time. (The clues are trivia questions about the city the present is located in) 

So what is the catch?  Well in order to do this you have to have downloaded the latest version of Google Earth.  Enter the concept of “updatebait” - Update Google Earth and watch Santa trek across the planet.

I really do think this is a great marketing tactic and I gotta wonder how many people have either downloaded or updated Google Earth because of it.  It also has me questioning if this is something other software vendors can do - Give users an incentive to update or download your product aside from the fact it’s new. 

Think of the possibilities, “Receive special messages from the Easter Bunny, just by downloading IE 7”.

The NY Times gets Dugg into Social Media

Last week I posted on the fact that Dow Jones' MarketWatch has added "Digg It" and "Del.icio.us" link functionality to their news articles.  In a Techcrunch post this morning, the latest buzz is that mainstream news giant, the NY Times is also getting into social media integration with the availability of Digg It, Facebook and Newsvine links, as well as a "permalink" option for simply identifying the web address (no offense to the NY Times readership, but how many NY Times readers actually knew what a permalink was before this addition?) 

 

The big news here is that the NY Times has traditionally been a subscriber based news source.  While the information is really free to read anyways, the paper has gradually transitioned away from its original stance of user login for article access.  As sites like the NY Times and MarketWatch utilize social media sites like Digg and Facebook to (potentially) access larger audiences, is there awareness in appropriate ways to utilize this new type of information source online, or will it cause a dilution of quality and collaboration integrity that these sites were to be built on.

Update on Yahoo!'s Panama Upgrade

Following up Bob's review of Yahoo Panama, the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog posted a nice Panama FAQ that talks in detail about the Panama upgrade.  Good first steps for advertisers with questions.  Best of all, they are taking additional questions on the upgrade in the comments section of the post.

MarketWatch Adds Digg and Del.icio.us To Their News Releases

While looking at my favorite stock reports this morning in MarketWatch, I was rather stunned to see "Digg It" and "Del.icio.us" features at the top and bottom of the article. 

A quick scan on articles on the site seems to reveal that most MarketWatch content has this functionality.  While it is common to see RSS attached to most news syndication services as well as Podcast development, this is one of the first examples I've seen of social bookmarking tools being implemented as well, especially in such a large syndication service such as Dow Jones.  It also looks like MarketWatch is the first and only one of their services to incorporate this right now (possibly because services such as WSJ and Barrons are subscription based) 

Evidently, this is not new news of MarketWatch's incorporation of tagging technology, but it does demonstrate a more widespread public acceptance of these types of media channels for the distribution of information and communication.

Review of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s New “Panama” Release

As a Google AdWords professional I’ve been involved in Paid Search Marketing for over 5 years. I even had to the opportunity to provide feedback to Yahoo! (which they didn’t disclose their real name) about the type of service features and advertiser would be looking for. Using these tools on a daily basis I’m always looking forward to new features or techniques they provide to speed along my day.

Yahoo Search Marketing Background
Yahoo’s purchase of Overture in 2003 signaled a serious intent to provide full service Internet Marketing using paid search, but what they didn’t do was address the advertiser’s basic needs for managing their ads. Yes, their “bid to position” is a simple model for many, but both Google and MSN’s bidding position by relevancy means a smart advertiser can obtain better ROI by top positions at lower costs. Yahoo’s search marketing platform suffered from outdated features and lacked new functionality such as:

• Regional ad targeting to display ads in defined countries or regions
• Dayparting where you can increase bid limits for peak buying times
• Ad rotation testing
• Advance reporting to allow studying which hours of the day peak sales occur or customized fields

Even MSN's new search marketing platform, released this year is beating Yahoo! in terms of features and functionality. An overhaul was long due, so for search advertisers the release of the Yahoo! Panama interface is a very welcomed development.

New Yahoo! Panama Features and Functionality
As a paid search advertiser your day can be very busy managing thousands of search terms and hundreds of ads or campaigns. Sometimes you need to react quickly to loss-revenue issues if spending spirals out of control as a result of click fraud or competitive pressures. The one thing you can’t afford is wasting time “digging” thru a website to find data about the state of your campaigns.  Ease of use and easy-to navigate functionality is key.

The first view when you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is the dashboard that begins to address this. "I’m a big fan of web analytics, so even though I prefer web tracking outside of the tools Google or Yahoo provide, this doesn’t mean I don’t discount their conversion reporting." Quite the opposite, I live in their interfaces and view them as instruments for the driving the car, so having a customizable dashboard views is one of the “cool features”. Yahoo!’s new views means I can make faster turns when necessary. 

They are also incorporating a previously standalone service called "Search Optimizer" with a feature called the watch list. You can setup alerts at the campaign, ad level and even search term that provides time critical data if you’re Cost per Action is in danger. This helpful tool allows you to be more attentive of your top performing search terms, without having to spend lots of time actually doing it. And while mentioning managing costs, Yahoo! finally is on par with both Google and MSN by allowing ad campaign spending limits. Or to be more accurate they now allow multiple campaigns, which in the past they really only had one. That’s one feature I’ve been waiting on for quite some time.

Getting around the new interface is a big improvement and dare I say, even more intuitive than my long-term favorite Google! But there are still many features that I’d like to see from Yahoo!. One critical feature that is missing is the opportunity to bid on singular or plural variations of search terms. Rather odd limits of 50 negative search terms for the Advanced match (called broad in Google). Customized reports with the ability to do automatic mailings are a “would be nice to have” feature as well. Overall, the daily chore of managing a Yahoo! Search campaign will not be such a chore anymore.

Yahoo! is off to a good start with this new direction and when you combine the changes they will be making in the bidding structure, is a good time to concentrate your marketing efforts on the Yahoo! channel for the time being. Hopefully, since they have completely redesigned the system, waiting for new features will occur with more frequency than once every two years.

Splogging Turns To New Methods of Spam Tactics

The "State of the Splogosphere Part IV" gives us some hope that the continued problem of spam generation of blogs may be getting solved by the big blog search engines such as Google Blog Search and Technorati.  While it is far from complete, at the least, the engineers of these search tools are recognizing the issues and addressing them as best as they can (as echoed by Matt Cutts on Saturday).

Of course, that only means that the spammers use alternative methods to driving artificial links - comment spam has taken on a whole new meaning.  Even in our blog, which received little traffic, we end up filtering out comment spam on a regular basis.  I can't imagine authoring a blog with thousands of subscribers and manually filtering out the junk they receive.  What does this mean for the future of the social network?

My opinion is that social networks need to look at better filtering technology to get rid of the junk.  WordPress TOS clearly defines their intolerance to spam on their hosted servers and it can only be a matter of time before plugins are created to filter self-hosted blogs using the open source technology as well.  But the WordPress team eliminates blogs on their network that do not conform to guidelines as well - this is not just an empty statement.  The other blog software providers should be doing the same as well as the social network providers and "enablers" such as Technorati, Digg and YouTube.  If they do not, the greater danger is that they become useless or untrustworthy.  Think about how many web directories there are on the Internet that have so little value to the user.  The same may just as likely be said about Article Directories and Press Release syndication services. 

There is a reason that Google remains at the top of search technology today - because they care about the search results that they show and continue to find ways to update their algorithm to eliminate the misuse of web technology tactics designed to "game" their results.  But more importantly, perhaps they realized the fickleness of the web user, and the fact that by not doing this, the world of Internet technology easily allows their competitor to provide a better user experience and ultimately a better website.  The same needs to happen in the environment of the social network, and probably much sooner than later.