Monday we reported that Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? YahooSarah replied to that at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums explaining that the Overture tool is having issues but they are not taking it down.
I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.
If you are an advertiser, I'd suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).
In her message, it is clear that Yahoo! will be focusing their efforts on a new keyword tool, as opposed to getting the Overture tool working consistently.
The new Yahoo! tool will have an API, that will enable developers to integrate right into their campaigns, so I look forward to it. But it appears that Yahoo! will not continue to fully support the old, Overture tool.
Aaron Wall reports that Wordtracker is now offering a new free version of their keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. Defintely worth bookmarking, in my opinion.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
