Yahoo! / Overture Archives

It seems like the day has come, the day that Yahoo has killed the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Now, if you visit inventory.overture.com, you are redirected to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/. In fact, it is a permanent redirect, not just a temporary redirect, as you can see by using the URI Valet tool.

We knew this was coming, we have story after story reporting outages and downtime for this tool. Here is a run down of some of the stories we wrote covering the tool:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007
• More Server Problems With Overture's Keyword Tool on December 6, 2007

So does this end the saga with the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool or as it moved elsewhere?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Reports come from WebmasterWorld that web pages are being dropped from the Yahoo! Search index.

What some people are noticing for some domains, a site: command search bring up only the URL of the homepage and/or just the URLs of the pages. You can read a handful of Webmaster stories at the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are two spiders from Yahoo! that you may have been noticing crawling over pages recently. The first, is named Yahoo! Slurp China has reportedly been around since mid-Novmember of last year. The second, is named Yahoo! Search Marketing Crawler and has just been discovered, I believe.

Yahoo! Slurp China found recent activity as reported at DigitalPoint Forums under the User Agent;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp China; Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp China; http://misc.yahoo.com.cn/help.html)

WebmasterWorld has an older thread on the topic that IP block is 202.160.178. and 202.160.179. and it resolves to *.inktomisearch.com. If you don't like this spider, the folks at WebmasterWorld say you can just block its user agent and it won't affect the main Yahoo! Slurp. They say block; "User-agent: slurp china"

Yahoo! Search Marketing Crawler is a fairly unknown spider that sprung up some recent concern at WebmasterWorld Forums. It has been reported from the IP address 66.35.192.197 and 64.209.232.29, which is resolving to Savvis and not Yahoo! Senior Member, StupidScript, says that this spider is an automated ad-checker. He also said that Yahoo! has never claimed ownership of this bot and that they blocked it only to stop "receiving mail from SBC-Yahoo subscribers." I am not 100% sure about this so I will do a follow up with Yahoo! Search Marketing on this crawler.

This session covers what's new in the world of paid listings and other search advertising programs with moderation duties handled by Dana Todd of SiteLab. Dana and the panel give this session a "fashion" theme since it was fashion week recently here in New York, hence the photo above. Speakers include: Misty Locke of Range Online Media, Brian Mark of Toolbarn.com, Michael Sack of Inceptor and Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media.

This session is very different in that it is a forum, with no PowerPoint presentations. Dana Todd starts out with "news" including, click prices are up, Ask is sexier, Looksmart says they're better, MSN draggin out launch, pay per call is getting some attention and no more trademark ads on Yahoo.

A SEMPO survey reported that only 33% of respondents were happy with their SEM agencies for PPC, down from 62% last year. 25% were unhappy and 42% report mixed results.

What's keeping Dana up at night?
- Erosion of the search bubble, margins and SEM workforce
- 2nd tier engines are losing the trust battle
- Where is vertical search going?
- Small businesses are underserved. Their budgets are too low for most agencies to be able to justify taking on.
- A very large % of companies reported in the SEMPO survey want to take SEM in-house. Are SEM's better off being absorbed into agencies, companies?
- Are SEM firms going to become the service bureau's of the future?

Dana now walks the audience.

What kind of ratings would you give search engines for their input?

Misty: Room for a lot of improvement. Overall, rates them a 6.
Brian - a 6 is generous. We're not seeing a lot of service as an end buyer. No rep, no service.
Dana - is no rep better than a bad rep?
Michael - who's creating the strategy? Laments search engine ad reps, wet behind the ears, mis-advising clients. Gives an example involving Google. -1
Josh - Agrees that some "fresh off the boat" people at search engines are advising clients. Yahoo seems genuinely interested in SEMs buying their product. MSN is making an effort towards better customer service, their service "has been outstanding".
Misty - AOL is actually making an effort. What is the "next level" of service we need?
Michael - You should be getting your research from 3rd pary entities, not from search engines that have an interest in competitors bidding on the same terms.

Dana - What about the technical availability. Horror stories about systems being down, little lead time for system maintenance. Asks panel:
Misty - How many of you use APIs as a way to upload mass updates. Yahoo has done well to communicate technical issues. Google gets negative points. They are still in the habit of making changes and not telling anyone. "Oops it didn't work". MSN gets five stars.
Josh - Agree on Yahoo/Google communication. That said, Google's system is a more stable platform.
Misty - When APIs go down, has anyone noticed that you can't update your bids for 3-4 days?

Audience: You mention Ask's API. The question about ASk is distribution. That's a difficult call because some ads will go out to tier one partners some to tier two. Ideally we would segment.
Josh - Wonders wheather Ask will go the route of Google and allow advertisers to build their own ad network and cherry pick sites. "Ask is the RC cola of search."

Audience: Can you address the fee structure for clients?
Misty: It varies, but flexible. It needs to be enough to cover of the assigned ad team. Usually % of media. Hybrid of % and flat fee. Hybrid of $, flat fee and CPA.
Josh - We're a public service, we do this for the love of the craft - audience laughs.

Dana - We're in the communication industry. Are the search engines good communicators?
Black box - when you're bidding in the Google system you don't get 100% disclosure of all data related to that ad and how the ad is served and when.
Michael - When I think of paid search advertising, I think of it in terms of a calculated risk. When Google doesn't communicate how they are going to rank or serve your ads, you leave the realm of calculated risk and move into just risk.
Josh - Google has made some controls available - separating contextual from search. It's the auction process that's the issue. The fact is, no one knows how Google works. It's a matter of time before Yahoo implementing it's own complex marketplace.
Misty - Describes how when you upload terms to Yahoo, behind the scences, Yahoo relates some of your phrases behind the scenes to other phrases. Example: "travel" to "budget travel". For other media, you "know" where your ads are going to be placed. With search, you do not have those kinds of controls. Scores search engines negative 25.
Michael - Being able to test all the intermediary variables that affect conversion is part of good marketing. Doing so is part of the value that SEM agencies bring to clients. Scores search engines a zero.
Brian - Describes how he cannot control the ad placement is frustrating, particularly with Google.

Audience - I find it hard to believe that the companies and agencies don't tell the search engines about their disatisfaction and issues with "black box" ad serving.
Misty - They do have advisory boards and councils. They are also running a business. There have been improvements.

Audience - I sit on one of those boards so this is good to know.
Michael - Can you imaging what would happen to have a sit-in and pause your ad campaigns? They might listen when that happens.

Audience - I'm one of those advertisers that wants to bring SEM in-house. If your compaign cannot be executed according to the strategy, why would I outsource?
Dana - MarketingSherpa did a study on agencies vs in-house. Agencies do it better because it's all they do. The other part is maximizing the campaing, the linguistic part of it. Those are not typically the skills of an in-house marketer.
Josh - A lot of that heavy lifting happens through technology. Agenciesy can focus on analysis and getting strategic value out of the data. In house marketers do not always have access to that technology and do not get to spend the time on the strategy.

Audience - It seems last quarter Google's revenues were up over 100% and therefore your revenues are up over 100%, yet there is some disatisfaction in what you're saying.
Josh - I don't think this is a concern about revenue slowdown. Our businesses are growing as fast as any sector. You're sensing frustration of the changing nature of the industy. Understand, PPC used to be about 5% of pages and now with contextual it's about 100%. Soon print and radio will come into the mix.
Misty - Service has to set you apart. The fact that over 50% are not happy with SEMs, there's confustion about hwo you can trust.

Money Makeover - How do you think the search engines are doing handling your money, the advertisers' money?
Who do you think is the best money manager?
Panel- MSN

Click Fraud
SEMPO just released info that the number of advertisers concerned with click fraud has increased substantially.
Michael - Surveys audience 20-40% citing click fraud
Josh - Yahoo and Goolgle do a tremendous job at detecting click fraud. We've seen an amazing response to detection and getting credited. Tier twos are not as responsive. Marketers need to account for a pecentage of their ad spend to click fraud.
Michael - I have a friend that owns a sweatshop that has employees click on his clients' competitors ads. Search engines should get together as a consortium and share data anonymously and find the fraud.

Is it Google, Yahoo or MSN?
Showed screen shots of anonymous search results pages - they seem very similar.

Dana - Is anything creative happening?
Michael - MSN AdCenter people are saying AdCenter is "just like Google". It is exactly like Google. Where's the creativity?
Josh - Brings up trends towards offline integration such as dMarc and Google print.
Misty - Looking forward to enhancements such as display of the ads.

Audience: What about second tier search engines. Enhance, MIVA? Are they worth considering?
Michael - There's a reason you don't hear talk about tier 2 engines.
Josh - You can get value from tier 2 engines but be careful.
Michael - Shopping search engines are a different category than tier 2 engines like Kanoodle, Miva, etc.
Misty - Second tier engine campaigns are up/down up/down.
Josh - To use the financial metapor, tier two engines are the "over the counter" stocks.

SES NYC Tag: sesny2006

Business.com paid inclusion URL's in the search results get a closer look. SEW has a thread on some listings popping up in the Yahoo organic results originating from Business.com. The clicks appear to be routing through Business.com urls and there is a unique tracking code assigned once you click on the link. As Jeff Martin, a moderator at SEW explains he found since the last Yahoo update this past weekend, many business.com paid inclusions feeds were taking up some of the top spots above .gov's and .edu's in Yahoo. It would make sense to assume that something about those feeds is getting a boost to put them in the top position in the many serps and I can't say many would be happy about this either since it will cost advertisers. The particular site mentioned lost its previous rankings and they were replaced with the Business.com paid listings.

Now, Danny Sullivan explains that:

As for the ranking, paid inclusion URLs are given a quality score checkoff, and that can help with rankings. Some non-paid inclusion URLs are also given it, but that's more random. The checkoff for any site isn't a guarantee, but it can help. All the more reason why people may want to do paid inclusion at Yahoo -- or all the more reason Yahoo might want to elminated that, because of the trust issues involved.

Some words from the wise. Basically, if Business.com advertising is causing you to loose your rankings in Yahoo. Write, email, phone, or yell at Business.com and tell them to take your site out of the inclusion feeds it sends to Yahoo. By default, B.com will automatically put you site into a paid inclusion feed and inject it into Yahoo, thus causing your site to drop if it held natural rankings before hand.

Jeff goes onto explain that over the weekend the "business.com" 302 redirect urls in the serps have disappeared so it harder to identify, but they are still there. He also notes that while this may be something to consider for people that are not listed in Yahoo, he also notes that this will not be good for advertisers and their costs have gone up. For SiteMatch you might pay .10 a click, and in Business.com you are paying .65 a click. Good for them, bad for advertisers.

The big problem I see with some of this is the further encroachment of paid advertising links, feeds, and so on into the organic results. Why are Business.com feeds taking over previous rankings for a site in Yahoo? Are we approaching the point where a search engine no longer becomes a search engine, it become a search engine listing other search engines. Now how pointless is that? I think some of the time we often forget about what the web has to offer past the 10th result. To be honest I am not a fan of Yahoo search, and I can't see how these are helping relevancy or quality in the search results.

This SEW thread was pretty revealing and I think rather important.

Continue discussion on this at SEW - Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Seem Hijacked

By Nacho Hernandez | April 18, 2005

In recent news titled "Yahoo! Buys Brazilian PPC Search Network" from an article published by Kevin Newcomb from the ClickZ it says "Yahoo! is expanding its presence in Latin America with the purchase of Brazilian performance-based advertising network TeRespondo". This is one of the most important events happening for the Latin American search engine marketing industry. TeRespondo is the leading provider of performance-based online marketing solutions for Latin America, primarily Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

To better understand the deal, I put together a summary from aggregated numbers published by another ClickZ Article called "Population Explosion!" combined with a statistical analysis from the Internet World Stats:

This exhibit shows in more detail a comparison for each country in North, Central, South America and the Caribbean.

According to JupiterMedia with a projection of 77 million Internet users for 2005, Latin America ranks fourth among total Worldwide Internet users and is the fastest growing region in the world. In general, this market has been growing at compounded average growth rate of 33% - almost doubling the total worldwide average. Brazil alone is an extremely attractive market when compared to other global markets.

TeRespondo knew that most users were found in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Their market share for each region is unknown, but these three make up approximately 65% of the region's Internet population with Brazil alone accounting for 40%. The same also goes for most of Latin America's e-commerce transactions. Chile and Peru have large user populations and Colombia and Venezuela will most likely be part of this second group of important Latin American countries with Internet penetration.

How this deal came to be is fascinating to the Latin American search marketing industry. I have an understanding that for some time now Yahoo! had been trying to take market share away by going to TeRespondo's distribution partners and offering very appealing deals. However, these partners were very pleased working with TeRespondo and would just not want to let go. Could this be loyalty, a primary ingredient in Latin American business relationships? Then Yahoo! waited to see if MSN would renew their contract with TeRespondo as a first source of PPC ads for t1msn.com and other local MSN properties. Luckily for TeRespondo it was renewed and in very good terms. Therefore, there was really no other choice than to just buy them out and move on to gain long term market share over Google and MSN.

What a roller coaster ride that must have been for the two Colombian entrepreneurs that founded TeRespondo, Daniel (Danny) Echavarria and Juan Diego Calle. Bravo to these outstanding leaders of our search marketing industry. I also extend my congratulations to Brian Steel, President of Overture International, and Peter Celeste, General Manager for Latin America, with this outstanding strategic move for Yahoo!.

So what will Google do to compete with this move? I heard an interesting rumor that Google just hired a new general manager for it?s Brazilian operations. Well that's not all. Over at the Google Job Opportunities board it seems they have a lot more going on for Brazil, Mexico and who knows how many more new positions to be based in Mountain View, California will be focused on the Latin America operations. I believe that even though Yahoo! is well positioned in these countries thanks to the free email accounts which are widely used, Google can easily gain market share by hitting the young population with COOL ideas which are common to this company's marketing strategies.

I strongly believe MSN Search doesn't have much going on for these markets now. They are probably focused more in making their new search engine work at a level that can compete with Google and Yahoo!. They are probably happy with their PPC partnership with Yahoo! and gaining territory will be tomorrow's problem, not today's.

I wish most marketers in our industry can realize that this deal is just as important as when GoTo.com changed it's name to Overture back 4 years ago and then got bought by Yahoo!. Well, it's true that almost anything that happens in Latin America is usually delayed and mirrored to what's happened to the U.S. and European markets. Another latino entrepreneur from Argentina Lucas Morea, CEO of LatinEdge and founder of Monografias.com says, "Getting into this market now is like going back in time (like the 'Back to the Future' movie), where you can predict what will happen next because these markets follow the U.S. very closely. It just takes time." That's right and patience is sometimes a very good virtue to have for its Latin American dot-com players. Just like it happened for Danny and Juan of TeRespondo.

Now I hear Juan is off to Harvard for some business course retreat he does once a year (uff -- bad timing) and Danny is closing all transactions in their Miami headquarters. I wonder what these two latino entrepreneur superstars will do next after all of this is over?

I have a feeling it will take a good 2 or 3 months for the switch and hand off to Overture to happen. I imagine there are a lot of integration issues and notifications for their partners and advertisers to be made before they start seeing the name Overture or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Makes me wonder if they will even use the name Overture any more since it will be going away very soon now that Yahoo! Search Marketing was launched last week.

The other thing that I'm waiting to hear is what will happen to TeRespondo's employees which have an amazing know-how about the cultural aspects of these markets and the know-who to contact since most businesses are referral based. It would be a shame and a total wrong move if they let them go.

For TeRespondo's partners and advertisers this will be a positive transition. They will gain more efficiency with better platforms and technology. True that TeRespondo did an outstanding job with their PPC products and service, but Overture is a search marketing gladiator that will be able to deliver at a level that can compete with Google and MSN (in the future).

As a search engine marketer I know this will make my life a lot easier by managing my client's accounts under only two platforms rather than three. I also know that Yahoo! and Google will probably start tripping each other to gain market share. In reality, for the advertiser it's not about them dividing the Latin America search marketing pie, but rather growing it which will reflect in better products, service, technology and attention to these regions.

I'm sure there will be a lot more news to come about this deal. I will do my best to keep you posted. For the time being, you may join the thread "Yahoo! Gains Market Share in Latin America with TeRespondo" in SearchEngineWatch Forums and discuss the potential outcome for the Latin America search marketing industry.

Well, this seems to be brand new, http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/. Looks like they renamed from Overture's Precision Match to Yahoo!'s Sponsored Search. Well, actually a lot of the products were renamed. I did not look closely enough to see other changes, but I bet there are a lot.

Found by way of a new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: Looks like they updated their Overture ads to Yahoo! Search Marketing Ads, see:

Overture's Web site was turned over this morning, http://www.overture.com/.

As expected, Yahoo announced a Desktop Search of their own. There are some nice screen captures here. Chris Sherman authored the Search Engine Watch article on this, named Yahoo Launches Desktop Search. Gary Price blogged on it, so did John Battelle, Andy Beal, Zawodny & Horowitz @ YSearchBlog, and Nick W. I guess Google and MSN won't blog on this one. :)

For the Forum Round Up Check:
- Search Engine Watch Forums
- WebmasterWorld

There are those reporting that sites that were banned from Yahoo! Search are now reappearing in the Yahoo search results. I can not verify this information, but I did notice new pages being picked up by Yahoo recently. So maybe they are related. Forum chatter at WebmasterWorld.

I wonder what the Yahoo folks feel about this, I bet Tim is laughing his head off. Yesterday, Gary Price reported at the Search Engine Watch Blog that Howard Stern is a Yahoo! Guy. Basically Stern said he has been using Yahoo! forever and he thinks he will stick with it, commenting on the 60 Minutes Show with Google. They have posted a recap of the radio show's discussion on this segment at Howard Stern's Site, please be advised that there might be revealing images on the site - your notified.

For those who do not want to click over, here is the summary quoted word for word.

TO YAHOO! OR GOOGLE, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Howard talked about the "60 Minutes" piece on Google that ran the other night. Howard said he didn't understand why Google is such a huge deal because there are a lot of search engines out there. Howard said he's been using Yahoo! for years and is perfectly happy with it. Howard said the "60 Minutes" story on Google was practically an infomercial. It made Google Headquarters look like the coolest place on earth to work. He thought it was odd though that most of the guys who work at Google are now millionaires since the stock went public, yet they go out of their way to pretend they aren't rich. They all drive old, beat up cars and don't buy anything new or flashy. Howard said it's like they're all under the same paranoid delusion that if they enjoy their money, it will all go away. They also have some weird rule at Google where everyone promises to "Do No Evil." Everyone in the studio thought that was kind of bizarre. Artie said all he knows is that one time someone did a search for his name on Yahoo! and it came back will all these negative websites about him, mainly ones calling him fat and predicting his death.

I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Mayer, Aaron Ferstman and Nancy Evars from Yahoo! Search after the last session of the day. Let me take you through the conversation in chronological order, as best as I remember it.

After the "Search Engine Friendly Design and Coding (Especially Flash)", which Tim spoke at, I met up with Aaron at the speakers platform. Aaron was waiting for Tim to finish answering individual attendee questions. Aaron and I discussed the normal stuff you discuss with people when you first meet them. We discussed the fact that people in California like to buy big 4 wheel drive SUVs and how people in New York like to buy small fast cars. I myself just leased the Lexus SC430 (sporty convertible), and as you know, it does not drive well in the snow - you also probably know that New York tends to get its share of snow. We just found it funny that people in Cali like cars that are more suited to New Yorkers and New Yorkers like cars that are more suited for Californians.

After the car talk, we discussed what it takes to speak at these conferences, especially as a representative from the search engines. I commented that Tim does an excellent job. We agreed that these speakers need to be politicians. Soon after, Tim was ready for a cigarette so he pushed his way (being dramatic - he did not push anyone) out the conference room out onto the street where he can get a breath of fresh air (or cigarette). There Tim, Aaron and Nancy sat to talk about various topics.

We discussed the Yahoo! Search Blog, which Nancy works on and the conversations ultimately lead to Jeremy Zawodny, who will be arriving tomorrow, and his blog. Jeremy is known to say things in his personal blog which ruffel the feathers of some of the more corporate types over at Yahoo!, but overall it seems to me that most of the people over at Yahoo! are fairly relaxed. After meeting Tim, I get that impression.

The blog conversation moves on to, of course, to comment spam. Yahoo! Search Blog, as you know, allows for commenting - as opposed to Google's blog. Jeremy has a lot of experience with blogging and he uses MT Blacklist to fight comment spam on his blog as well as the Yahoo! Search Blog. Tim made a comment that he was at some bar with the WMW crew and one mentioned that they tried to comment spam Jeremy's blog. Of course Jeremy blocked the comment spammer from doing so in the future. But another WMW folk said that if he was spamming blogs, he would make sure not to spam a Yahoo! employee's blog.

We then discussed ThreadWatch.org, NickW's blog, Tim loves reading it. Tim finds ThreadWatch to be more of a forum then a blog, I see his point - but I disagree. We discussed giving ThreadWatch.org a link on the left hand navigation of the Yahoo Search Blog site. I think it might happen in the near future. From ThreadWatch we moved onto forums. We discussed some of the exciting threads, such as the one about how people post spammers in order to show Yahoo! and Google who the spammers are. Tim kind of hinted that he wouldn't do anything manually when he finds such a thread. Of course he could not comment on Google's behalf.

I then asked Tim about all the PM's he gets or Sticky Mails (as they are referred to at WMW). He says he gets some of the funniest things. One story he told me was about this Sticky he got from someone who basically copied content off another site and complained that his site was not listed. After Tim responded to the member who sent him the sticky mail, the member responded that he was a cab driver and he should give him a break. Of course, Tim knew that this person was not a cab driver - so he found the whole situation funny.

That conversation lead to how Yahoo! handles the re-inclusion of pages that were delisted. He said that you can email an address and Yahoo! should review it within 2 weeks or so. He gave me specific examples of such cases, but no need to mention them here. At first, he explained, Yahoo! was bombarded with requests for re-inclusion (this occurred after Yahoo! merged all the other engines into one). But now, a re-inclusion request should be reviewed quickly.

Then the Yahoo folks split up and I walked with Tim back to the Hilton. During the walk, we talked more about giving NickW that link on the Yahoo Search Blog and some football talk. Tim is a Steelers fan, I myself am a Jet fan (yes I know). We talked a bit about how we used to run rotisseries before it was all automated on the Web. He used to fax back and forth sheets between people. I actually had my brother write small programs to help keep track of the stuff.

As we approached the Hilton, we talked about how Yahoo's Blog links to Google's blog and how MSN's blog links to both Yahoo's Blog and MSN's Blog. But you do not see Google linking to either Yahoo or MSN. :) Which lead us to talk about those Google bombs, and the recent "more evil than Satan", when queried at MSN Search Beta brought up Google. Of course the engines play games with each other, and he shared some funny stories with me on that. At that point we exchanged cards and parted ways.

It was nice meeting the folks at Yahoo. Nancy was nice to talk to, real smart and fun. Aaron is an all around nice guy, seems very hard working and honest. Tim has way too much fun over at Yahoo!, seems way to laid back and, to be serious, is an excellent communicator.

Now this thread confuses me. A member posted a thread named Overture And Spidering, where he reports findings of Yahoo's Crawler, Slurp, has been clicking on his overture ads.

In response to this post, YahooMike says;

This might be happening as part of an ongoing test. If you're using a tracking URL, the crawler visits may appear to be clicks on your listings. If this occurs you won't be charged for these clicks.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Mike

This is just so strange to me. Any ideas as to why Yahoo would want its crawler to click on its own Overture ads? I don't see any purpose to it. Alright, I am done trying to figure this one out - this is just too funny.

WebmasterWorld does it again, provides answers by reputable sources to questions that plague search engine marketers. So we have about three "local" products by Yahoo!, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local and Overture Local Match. What does what, who offers what and how does it help me?

OvertureRep's second post at WMW provides a clear answer:

Yahoo! Yellow Pages consists of a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA plus a section of paid listings in the Sponsored Businesses section. The Sponsored Businesses section consists of paid listings from our reseller partners, self-service, and Overture. The Overture products are geographically targeted Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Yahoo! Local also includes a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA, several other data sources, and web content. Yahoo! Local also has a sponsored business section which solely consists of geographically targeted Overture Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Overture Local Match is a product for advertisers that have a physical storefront or service a specific geographic region. Advertisers provide a description and details about their business and do not need a website to participate. The advertiser chooses the relevant keywords and defines the geographic region to target their listing.

Here are a couple of links you can go to for more info:

Yahoo! Local: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/local/index.html
Overture Local Match: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/lm.jhtml

A thread at WebmasterWorld brought this to my attention.

Conduct a search on overture at Google.com (click on the bold link), and you won't find overture's Web site in the main search results. In fact, Brett_Tabke says that Overture "bans all indexing via robots.txt" and Google just obeys the robot.txt file. Why does Overture disallow all indexing by the robots? Brett suggests "Don't you think that having your competitors bot crawling all over your website is a bit creepy?" I feel Brett is joking with this response, let me try to give my own opinion on why they are disallowing organic robots.

Overture is an advertising company based on mostly the pay per click revenue model. What do they have to lose by allowing Google or other engines from indexing their site? I don't see anything. Can it be a matter of principle? A PPC company should show its customers that organic (free/natural) results are not as effective as PPC/Paid results? By them disallowing organic robots from crawling and indexing its site, they are making a strong statement that PPC is where it is at!

Oh, but Yahoo! owns Overture, and Yahoo! has their own organic search engine. Well still, they are separate divisions with unique missions. In fact, if you do a search on overtue in Yahoo! you will find overture.com listed. Well, if you look closely, that is a form of Overture's Site Match - overture's pay for inclusion and cost per click program that works with Yahoo. So it is a form of paid advertising, which overture supports.

In the pursuit to be number one in the PPC arena, Overture launches Local Match, which "enables businesses to increase sales by precisely targeting customers searching on the Internet for local products and services whether your business has a Web site or not."

You no longer need to purchase keywords with a geographic keyword in mind. For example, in the past, if you wanted to target New York, you needed to purchase the keyword "New York Keyword". Now all you need to do is purchase the keyword and specify "geographic area (0.5-to 100-mile radius around your location) in which your ad will be seen." Plus you do not even need to have a Web site to participate, instead the searcher will be directed to a phone book like entry with information on how to contact your physical store front.

Forum coverage at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch.

"Starting at around 8:30 am EDT (12:30 UTC), a number of sources started to report a widespread Akamai DNS issue. Large web sites, which use Akamai for its DNS service, did no longer resolve. Effected sites are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple and likely many others.

Some effected domains have removed the Akamai DNS servers and are reachable again using their own DNS servers.

Typically, the domain itself (e.g. 'google.com') still resolves, but popular hostnames, like 'www.google.com' will not resolve. As a result, the web site is no longer reachable.

The effect appears to be world wide. Some of the Akamai servers do respond to pings, but do not respond to DNS queries."

I wasn't going to post this here but its covered at all the major SEM forums.

• WebmasterWorld
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• SEO Chat Forums
• HighRankings Forum
• and others...

I would like to apologize for the less frequent updates here the past few days. I hacker from China has been attacking my local network affecting the Internet and productivity at my company. We have successfully installed and configured a Cisco PIX to block the hacker and everything seems to we working well now. I will be away for the remainder of the day at meetings.

The grandfather of search engines, AltaVista and the "new Google", AllTheWeb close up the add url shop.

AltaVista Add URL:

Search results on AltaVista will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

AllTheWeb Add URL:

Search results on AlltheWeb will soon be powered by Yahoo! Search Technology. For fast submission to the Yahoo! Search Technology index via the Overture Site Match(tm) program, Click Here.

The ABAKUS forum is currently the only one discussing this.

I was just talking with someone last night about how Yahoo is trying to be more like Google (i.e. cache, news, etc.) and Google is trying to be more like Yahoo (i.e. local results). I was kind of exaggerating but if anything Yahoo now made it clear that they want to be Google.

Yahoo yesterday released its Yahoo! Companion Toolbar - BETA (version 5.4.9) with WebRank. WebRank versus PageRank, this will be fun for us SEOs. ;)

Yahoo! Web Rank is the name that Yahoo! has given to a technical measurement of a particular URL's popularity. If you choose to enable the Yahoo! Web Rank feature on the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar, a toolbar icon will display the Yahoo! Web Rank value of each URL that you visit. The Yahoo! Web Rank values range from 1 to 10. This feature is currently in Beta release.

Forum coverage at:
SEO Chat
WebmasterWorld

Yesterday I posted a entry named Questions for Yahoo? Ask At WebmasterWorld. If you want the answers to the questions you or others have asked please see the WebmasterWorld thread named Answers from Yahoo!, by Mike from Yahoo! Search.

The folks over at WebmasterWorld were able to get some of the Yahoo reps to stop by an answer your questions about the new Yahoo! Search and Overture - SiteMatch.

WebGuerrilla, a WMW Admin, posted the following:
Here’s how it will work:

Questions will be posted in this thread. We will let this thread run for the next few days. Once we have a solid list of quality questions, this thread will be locked. If/when someone from Yahoo Search decides to respond to a question from this thread, we will split off that particular Q&A into its own thread. Any follow-up questions or discussions will take place in the new thread. Doing this will help us keep everything on-topic.

With that in mind, here are some ground rules:

1. Keep the questions focused on Yahoo Search’s products and services. (No asking Tim what his favorite color is)

2. Keep the questions short and sweet. (You will have the opportunity to get long-winded in any follow-up discussions).

3. No specific site information. (We are not the Yahoo help desk or spam police)

4. Keep the tone positive and professional. (All rants will be nuked)

5. Read the other questions before you post yours. (I hate spending time deleting duplicates).

Visit the thread at WebmasterWorld's Questions for Yahoo!.

I get pleasantly surprised when Yahoo annouces a new product, or service. They always seem like they just can't wait to show up their new shiny object. It's fun for us, cause before they ever do we start to pick out what they will launch, annouce, or morph next. So I found this new article enlightening, because yahoo said exactly one week ago that it would be focuses on "localization and personalization" with enhanced forms of media for future search. So yesterday, Yahoo launched SmartView, a new local Web search tool, that use Yahoo Maps in order to allow users to search for restuarants, theatres, and other places by a single address. Looking for General Tso Chicken at 2am, in Chinatown, insert you address and it will find the closest chinese places.

Check out Yahoo SmartView here.

As posted at SEO Chat by dazzlindonna, "Login to Yahoo and go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request".

Tim Mayer started a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing the new Yahoo! inclusion program. The thread can be found here.

The week of March 1, Yahoo will be allowing you to submit for free. The submit page can be found here.

There has been ton of talk about search engine market share over at the forums and search engine related blogs. All saying that Yahoo has a ~30% share and Google has about a ~39% share. But what really matters is your traffic patterns.

Why is it that most of of the sites out there have 70% of their traffic from Google and 10% from Yahoo? Are the SEOs only optimizing for Google? Does search engine friendly design only apply to Google?

There can be many reasons why one site gets more of its traffic from Google over Yahoo. (1) Keywords rank better for a site in Google vs Yahoo. (2) Your site appeals more to the Google type of Web user. or (3) Google just really does have a better market share, over the estimated 39%.

There is a thread on this at SEO Chat, visit the Yahoo! Traffic today!

While working on a little project that made a site completely database driven, I realized that Yahoo and MSN incorrectly strip off trailing slashes in URLs (because I started seeing 404 page not found errors in my web logs).

For example, the URL http://www.domain.com/directory/ is linked to as http://www.domain.com/directory from both MSN and Yahoo.

This is bad for two reasons... first of all, it's just plain wrong, the two URLs could in theory be separate documents. Second, it's a waste of bandwidth. Most web servers are configured to add a slash to the end of a URL if there is no file that matches the name, and there *is* a directory with that name via a HTTP redirect. So now, the end user's browser needs to make two requests to the server to get one document.

The reason I figured it out is I *had* directories at one point, but moved to dynamic, database driven content. So the web server wasn't redirecting them with the wrong URL because there was not a directory with that name any longer.

Bad MSN, bad Yahoo... Naughty, boys.

Well it seems webmasters are going to have some more possible costs to consider in the next few months if they are planning to stay in Yahoo. On April 15, 2004 all sites that are included through the Inktomi index will be dropped unless renewed into Yahoo special inclusion program, that most of Inktomi's resellers will be selling soon. So don't go spending the babys milk money yet, wait until April to submit to Ink or Yahoo. And its probably best to start considering the Yahoo Directory at that time as well, if you can chuck down the 299. Lots of new changes afoot, be sure to check out the discussion at SEOchat.com, read it here: Yahoo Pay for Inclusion

Well it is official Yahoo dumps Google search technology. But its not pure Inktomi results as we were expecting. It seems to be more of a mix of a bunch of results including some of the Yahoo directory. But I am not 100% sure yet.

Does this make the Yahoo! Directory submission fee more attractive to its customer? Duh!

"Yahoo replaced Google's results with its own Yahoo Search Technology, which combines an array of recently acquired search technologies, such as Inktomi and commercial search provider Overture Services."

Make sure to keep an eye out for Yahoo Slurp, the new Yahoo Spider.

SEO/SEM Forum coverage at:
SEO Chat: 1 | 2 | 3

Cre8asiteforum: 1 | 2

WebmasterWorld: 1

JimWorld: 1

HighRankings: 1

IHelpYou: 1 | 2

WebProWorld: 1

Webmasters Forums was down this morning.

People at WebmasterWorld have been reporting this morning that Yahoo has finally made the switch from Google's Search to Inktomi's Search. It looks like Yahoo switched back to Google soon after. Lets keep watching Yahoo! Search.

WebmasterWorld's thread on this can be found here, if your a paid subscriber click here.

SEO Chat thread covering this can be found here.

update: 3PM (EST) - Looks like Inktomi results are back in Yahoo Search. They don't match Inktomi exactly but they are not Google either.

Check out Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry, the Yahoo! engineer, a few days back on this.

update: 4:30PM (EST) - Google Results Back. Getting a bit dizzy here.

Danny Sullivan wrote a famous article back about three months ago on Searching With Invisible Tabs. This article details the problem that is slowly happening to the Google search engine, where Google keeps adding tabs for users to specify if they are searching for web, images, products, news and other types of searches. Danny predicts that if Google keeps going at this rate you can expect to see dozens of tabs that turn the simple search engine query box into a complicated set of tabs.

I visited Yahoo's search homepage which I just noticed had this "Add or Remove Tabs" link on the left bottom portion of the last tab. So I clicked on it to find the ability to add a total of 9 tabs!

Yahoo! does this with class, they don't require you to have tabs but they give you the option of adding tabs if you desire. They must figure that more advanced users will opt for the tabs and there is no loss on anyones part.

Did Yahoo! miss Danny's point of "invisible tabs", the ability for a search engine to predict which tab the user wants based solely on what query is entered into the search box? Or is this just an intermediate stage until search technology can supply meaningful and accurate results based on the 'style' of how a query is entered?

Thanks Brette Tabke from WMW

I have just found out that if you would like to check your rankings in the new inktomi powered Yahoo you can go to http://search.yahoo.com/ and type in your keyword: I am using "online phramacy" because I am on the first page lol
Normally you would see the google powered: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&ei=UTF-8&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

However if you go to the address bar and at the end of your kw portion of the url add: &tmpl=E088

Like so: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=online+pharmacy&tmpl=E088

This gives you the results for the new Ink powered yahoo :-)
Try it out!

There was an interesting post on SEOchat.com, regarding what it takes for the Slurp robot (which is the main Inktomi spider) to grab most of the pages on someone's website. If you check your logs, you might find Slurp only grab a few pages, but at other times grab many more pages all for free. Folks, this bot has a mind of its own sometimes. Its well behaved, but quite selective. While Inktomi is primarly a Pay For Inclusion based engine. Where you have to pay for each page you would like to get indexed. If your website has achieved a certain age, plus high quality inbound links, quality content, and a smile from Inktomi, then its likely your page will eventually make it into Inktomi for free. Usually its takes a number of years (possibly less) in order to get this type indexing, its worth noting that new sites will not always get spidered completely by Inktomi. So don't fret if you submit the homepage, and it the only thing that is found in Inktomi. Time is all it takes (which little of us has these days). So its recommended that if you can't wait, submit those pages your have optimized for Inktomi and you feel would be best suited, and worth the money for indexing in Inktomi.

Visit this thread at Inktomi Indexing....

Two exciting news related items occurred this week and have drummed up a lot of discussion in some forums. Since I have been leaving out Webmaster World (not on purpose) I decided to take some time to plug them.

First news worthy fact is that Yahoo! opened up Yahoo! Labs. Concept taken from Google Labs? I'll leave those questions to the forums. WebmasterWorld is discussing this topic here and SEOChat is discussing it here.

Next news worthy rumor is that Google will now take its AdSense program and allow you to put them in email. This can be huge for so many people and companies. Check out the threads at Webmaster World and SEO Chat.

Exciting stuff, don't you think?

While its relatively not too difficult to optimize for Inktomi in general, getting blacklisted by Inktomi is actually a little easier than most realize. I believe a lot of it stems with people over or out doing the optimization of another website that ranks well in Inktomi. Keyword density is not always a magic bullet for Ink. The problem with getting penalized in Inktomi is that most are not even aware of what they got blacklisted for in the first place, they assume the worst and that the "sky is falling". Well despite titanic fears of the worst and short of getting abducted by aliens there shouldn't be anything to fear, its relatively easy to get back your rankings in Inktomi. The first thing people should do is look at their website to begin with. Do this before emailing Positiontech or Inktomi with vague questions as the to the nature of your site. If you identify possible problem areas and be specific you are more likely to get a better answer. Here are some problem areas that have popped up in the past for people who got blacklisted.

1. Hidden text contained within or off the viewable area of the website or page
2. Formatting meta-tags that are incorrect in syntax or appropriate length. This applies to meta data and titles as well.
3. Meta data that has nothing to do with the page itself.
4. Cascading Style Sheets can create problems when used incorrectly.
5. Cloaking pages that either direct or feed the Slurp robot something other than what is originally there.
6. Affiliate URL's, inserting affiliate id's within a URL.
7. Redirecting visitors for no apparant reason
8. Heavy inbound linking for artifically raising link popularity, could possibly apply to networks of sites that cross link only with a single network.

While doing some testing (and playing around I might add) this week with some of the "backdoor" and free submission url's for Inktomi. I managed to succeed in getting a brand new site spidered by Inktomi within 5 days of my initial submission. Now while I used to use these free submission forms before, back in the days when $39 was way to much money to spend to SEO for Inktomi, 5 days for getting Slurp to find a site was unheard of! Whether it was a fluke or not, I figured that it was would be benefical to post some of these urls, and let other SEO's and webmasters test them out.

Submit to Inktomi for Free - The problem: Its unreliable, no guarantees, and does not update within 48 hours. While this method is surely not as effective as pay for inclusion, who can beat the price? If you are strapped for cash then this might be a temporary option to get your pages into Inktomi until you can pay for more reliable methods.

http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Submit to Inktomi through one of its Web Search Partners - This is one of the Inktomi backdoors many are not aware of and all it takes is a little searching to find them. I have used these on multiple occasions in order to test how effective they are and as well get pages into the Inktomi index for free. One of things I discovered was that taking a look at a list of Inktomi partners (http://www.inktomi.com/customers/index.html) was not only good to get a feel of where their search engine results would appear, but also where I could find submit fields for inclusion into the Inktomi database. Note: These pages do not stay up for long, so do not be surprised if you find they no longer exist.

http://goo502.goo.ne.jp/cgi-bin/feedback/addurl.cgi
http://search2.msn.fr/suggestions/ch/

Brief overview: Yahoo! has been using Google's search results to power its organic search service. Yahoo!, over the past year, has purchased several search engine technologies - including Inktomi and Overture (which at that time owned AltaVista and AllTheWeb).

The main speculation was that Yahoo!, since it purchased Inktomi right out, would be using Inktomi results after it leaves Google. We have also seen cases where Inktomi results have been experimented with Yahoo in the main stream search and largely overseas.

Grumpus a moderator over at cre8asiteforums posted at HighRankings Forum his opinion that Yahoo will not being using Inktomi but rather AllTheWeb and/or AltaVista.

Very interested information, read more about it at http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2826.