The next session I attended was the Organic Listings Forum. They just added in Tim Mayer from Yahoo to the session, so this should be good. Other interesting people are Mike Grehan and Brett Tabke. This room is so packed and really hot.
Tim: started up with his free crawl and said it will be available this week. They are targeting the "hidden web". And third, re-launching the paid inclusion. They feel the paid inclusion is going to be Yahoo's competitive advantage. Paid inclusion is there to give the SEMs more of a say. He basically reiterated his post at WMW.
Paddy Bolger said now you can be hurt from links. For example, if your site is linked to by a major authority, Google might remove your site because there is no need for you to be there, since you have a link from the authority site. Its not a penalty but more of a filter. This was a bold statement, what do you think?
Some woman took off at Tim Mayer about the CPC plus PFI concept. So you pay to be included AND you pay per click. But you do not bid, you just pay if someone clicks on you. Everyone clapped when she said this and Tim blushed. ;)
Then we had a lot of discussion of themeing and authority sites. The agreement is that Google is practicing this. So links from non-relevant sites are less important then links from relevant sites.
Regarding Geo-filtering, they said they look at language, domain name and links. Yahoo said they do not look at IP address, but I find this hard to believe. Google looks at the IP addresses - or at least based on my last study in December they did.
Yahoo differs from Google by utilizing the keyword meta tags. On page factors are very important. Yahoo also does not have stemming on by default like Google does. Google will index only 101k of your page, Yahoo does 500k of your page.
