An email went out last night to all Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) customers notifying them of new changes to come to YSM in 2006. YahooSarah at Search Engine Watch created a thread named New Look Coming For Yahoo Sponsored Search Listings where she informs the rest of us about these changes.

How this change impacts your listings:

• Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored Search listings
• You don’t have to make any changes to your listings; they’ll be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
• If you’d like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin your description with one short sentence that includes your keyword and focuses on your most important information in the first 70 characters
• Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that we believe works best for advertisers and search users
• Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace, will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored Search listings, though the exact length may vary from partner to partner

We believe that this change will improve the search experience for its users. As usual, if you have any comments feel free to post here, we welcome your feedback or send me a private note.

These changes will take place on January 18, 2006, so be prepared and optimize your new ad titles.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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