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We apologize for the inconvenience but have removed this link building tactic from the archive. Make sure to check out our search engine marketing blog for more strategies and information on SEO, PPC and social media.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
According to a report released Monday by Internet metrics company comScore, Google and Yahoo gained slightly in overall search market share (0.3 and 0.1% respectively), while MSN dropped by 0.2%. As of October, Google now processes 45.4% of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo ranks second at 28.2% and MSN a distant third at 11.7%. Holding their own, Ask.com sits at 5.8%.
I personally can't help rooting for Ask.com to overtake MSN by the end of Q1 2007 (of course this statement brings a recent post in SEOMoz to mind).
Its worth noting that the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN are joining together to collaborate on a unified sitemaps program. You can find out more of the program at sitemaps.org, which is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. This post is one the myriad of posts out there on the topic, so to find more information and commentary, here's a link to Google's official announcement on their webmaster blog and Yahoo's post as well..
The latest statistics from Hitwise are in for May, and as the title says: "Google Crushes Competition" with almost a 60% hold on the search market. With MSN Adcenter finally unveiled, and Yahoo looking to significantly revamp it's own search advertising toolsets by the beginning of the 4th quarter, it will be interesting to see if this hold can continue through 2007.
But the additional significance to this infers one other underlying theme: Google organic search is better. At least better than MSN and Yahoo for the time being. More people use it because more people find the results they want when using Google versus the rest of the industry. This is the soft-sell of the industry - organic search results establish the value of where people search. Better organic search leads to more visitors entering queries, leading to more people ultimately clicking search advertisements. While providing a more efficient advertising engine will help the bottom line quarter to quarter (and the stock price), it will not help the competition gain market share. If search engines like Yahoo and MSN really want to attract more visitors, the answer lies in improving organic search.
Consider the following factors:
In Summary:
If search engines like MSN and Yahoo really want to make a dent in the search market, it's through an investment in better organic search that will lead the way through the long-term. Optimizing paid advertising helps with the bottom line today, but focusing on this at the exclusion of organic search improvement ignores the opportunity to attract a larger percentage of clicks from an audience that is constantly demanding better organic search and not necessarily better advertisements.
In the news today, Yahoo and eBay, joining forces to provide collaborative services amongst two of the largest, most trafficked sites on the World Wide Web (first and fifth respectively - according to Alexa traffic data). The search landscape is changing, as market leaders look to partner with other major content providers, integrating search technology, cross-linking ad networks, and offering collaborative services.
Have you seen the latest home page for Yahoo? I personally like it - but I am more of a fan of the clean, straight-forward look. I always enjoyed Google and was never much of a fan of the bolder MSN colors. It just seemed too cluttered. Yahoo originally started filtered the home page into IE user views and I really had a negative reaction at first. It was a little too "in your face" when it first came out. Fortunately for them (if Yahoo cares much), my font settings are really strange in IE, so that was half the problem. Now that they have roled out the beta home page for Firefox, it looks a lot nicer.
The only problem I had when I viewed the site in IE, which is now addressed with my traditional setting in Firefox, is that I could not identify my specific Yahoo services anymore - such as Finance, Sports and Mail. I still think they could do a better job highlighting them, or repositioning them based on the template, but it looks much better than before.
Here's my one question: Why can't users simply have the ability to modify content that appears - a la My Yahoo - right on the home page? I would imagine that more people would accept these type of services - customization, personalization etc, if they were right in front of you. Statistics indicate that less than 1% of all Yahoo traffic actually uses My Yahoo*, which may or may not be because of privacy issues. Wouldn't it be more user-friendly if I could just get my personalized content right on the home page? Yahoo already offers the ability to sign in - which gives you your weather, email notification and specific Yahoo services highlighted, so the next logical step - RSS for content, aggregated service highlights etc, should not be too much of a jump (should it?).
I use Yahoo everyday and use My Yahoo only when I remember, but to have all of my news, services (I'm addicted to fantasy baseball and football, and use Finance regularly) and features right there, plus my Small Business account information, whenever I load up Firefox, I may never have to use another portal service again.
What started out as a light post to see if I could gather some real commentary has turned into a full-blown media story. CNN/Money issued an article this morning hinting at a possible acquisition of Yahoo! stock by Microsoft in order to increase market share in the search industry.
Is it possible? Perhaps. But MSN s spending a lot of resources building their own PPC and search platform, so this would appear to be a complete market share play. The chatter hit Webmaster World this morning as well. Here's a thread with some thoughts on the subject.
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