Welcome to Internet Marketing & SEO

Yahoo Defends Google Deal

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 13.09.2008 | Category Google, Yahoo

As part of a three-hour media day today, a Yahoo executive offered an interesting defense of the company’s pending search deal with Google. That deal, which was supposed to start in a few weeks, has come under increasing fire by people concerned that it will cement Google’s already huge lead in search advertising. Now, Justice is apparently looking whether there’s a case to quash the deal.

Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo U.S., positioned the deal with Google as an extension of Yahoo’s partnerships by which other publishers such as hundreds of U.S. newspapers can sell ads on Yahoo properties. Her example: Search for “red roses in Birmingham Alabama” and you get no ads on Yahoo search results page. Google’s search results page has 11 advertisers. So by hooking up with Google, Yahoo is giving those advertisers a chance to reach Yahoo users as well as Google users and potentially get more customers. In Yahoo’s view, says Schneider, “We are able to essentially create more access and better ROI for the advertisers.”

Many advertisers don’t think that tradeoff is worthwhile because they believe they’ll pay more for the same results. Yahoo’s essentially saying that advertisers will be getting better results for their money, whatever they pay. I don’t envy the Justice Dept. trying to sort all this out.

Update: During questions after her presentation, Schneider said Yahoo is confident the company can get Justice “comfortable” with the deal by the planned early-October start of the deal. She said Yahoo is “actively involved in the conversation” with Justice on the deal.

Schneider shrugged off concerns by some advertisers that ad prices would rise after the deal. “Advertisers are rational and bid what they see value for,” she said. Also, she notes, Google advertisers today can’t reach Yahoo users with their ads, so the deal would help them do that and in the process serve Yahoo users with ads they didn’t get before.

Given all the furor of the last few days, I’m surprised Yahoo sounds so confident. It may not be long before we find out if that confidence is well-placed.

Microsoft Yahoo Merger starts Again

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 19.05.2008 | Category Microsoft & MSN, Yahoo

A potential partnership deal between Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. the companies revealed over the weekend may prove to be a stepping stone to an outright acquisition, analysts said on Monday.

UBS analysts said in a research note that the business discussions between Microsoft and Yahoo could be a prelude to an eventual outright acquisition offer because it was vital for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo on friendly terms.

“A near-term deal could act as an intermediate step that would go a long way toward testing the waters,” UBS wrote.

The brokerage said a Microsoft-Yahoo partnership is likely to focus on search advertising and should be seen as an alternative to a scenario in which Yahoo would outsource to Google Inc. part of its Web search ad sales.

Stifel Nicolas argued that Microsoft may be seeking to buy Yahoo’s search and search-advertising business outright, leaving Yahoo independent but smaller, focused on display advertising and Internet media businesses.

Stifel analysts George Askew and Scott Devitt warned that Yahoo must reach a deal with either Google or Microsoft or face a bruising proxy battle with activist investor Carl Icahn, who is seeking to install his own slate of Yahoo directors.

Icahn launched a proxy campaign last Thursday to replace Yahoo’s board with directors who would reopen talks with Microsoft, saying Yahoo had acted irrationally in refusing the software company’s $47.5 billion bid.

The proxy battle “may ultimately drive a damaged Yahoo into Microsoft’s arms” at around $31 per share, Stifel said.

Microsoft made a $31-per-share cash and stock offer in late January. Earlier this month, Microsoft discussed raising that offer to $33 a share, but backed away after Yahoo management held out for $37 per share.

The software giant’s move to court Yahoo was likely to prompt the Icahn to press Yahoo to further pursue an alliance with Google, a person familiar with the billionaire investor’s thinking told Reuters on Sunday.

Yahoo! Search Support for X-Robots-Tag Directive to Simplify Control

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 12.12.2007 | Category SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo

Today we’re announcing support for tags that give webmasters even more flexibility over which pages and documents are crawled and indexed by Yahoo! Search. Specifically, we’re extending our support of page level exclusion tags — NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, NOFOLLOW — to provide additional control for archiving and summarization of ANY file type. Previously, these page level tags could only be expressed within html pages through the META directive (for e.g. ), but based on feedback from our webmasters, Yahoo! now enables these tags to be expressed through X-Robots-Tag directive in the http header, giving webmasters the flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types, including html files, and increasing their coverage through a simplified process. Additionally, webmasters no longer need access to html templates in order to express exclusions for html files. To take advantage of this feature, simply add the following page level tags to the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header. Here are a few examples:

X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX — If you don’t want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.
Note: We’ll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don’t wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE — If you don’t want to display cache link in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET — If you don’t want to display summary in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW — If you don’t want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

Along with this change, we’ll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

We’re at SES in Chicago and WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas, participating in a few different panels this week. Please find us if you have any questions or suggestions or drop us your feedback here.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

from:Yahoo! Search Blog

Tips for Getting Backlinks to Your Website

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 16.11.2007 | Category Google, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo

Thinking of outsourcing your reciprocal linking? Think again. There are more benefits to linking than just getting links. Consider doing at least some work yourself.

First let’s make a master list, all the usual ways we can think of to get quality, relevant links back to a website.

1. Fill out a form or email a webmaster, asking for a reciprocal link.
We’ll assume for the purpose of clarity that we mean exchanging links to post to a traditional directory page.

2. Deep linking.
You embed your partner’s link into relevant text on a page other than your directory page, and your partner does the same with your link.

3. Links from signatures.
This can be a signature you place at the end of every email you send out, or in forum posts.

4. Comments left on other websites.
This can be a blog or a comment form on any website. These will usually have your website url attached to the comment.

Yahoo! Mail - System’s Down

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 16.10.2007 | Category Yahoo

Well, I got that error while using yahoo mail!

Can’t talk now. System’s down.

Sorry for the holdup. Looks like a temporary glitch in our network has part of Yahoo! mail down, so you’re briefly without service. Rest assured the alarms are blaring in the basement and our team is working frantically to get you up and running ASAP. Again, the snag is on our end — so there’s no need for you to do a thing.

Back to it,
Yahoo! Mail Team

Its not good for yahoo in that competitive age.

Yahoo opens up social networking site MASH

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 18.09.2007 | Category Internet News, Yahoo

San Francisco (CA) - Yahoo has launched a beta version of Mash, its latest attempt at social networking.

According to the site’s official blog, the service allows users to create their own profile using a variety of custom design tools, and they are able to interact with their friends’ profiles as well. These are the same basic features that outline Myspace and Facebook. Yahoo Mash also lets users create “starter profiles” for their friends to make it easier for them to get started with the service.

“Of course, there are extensive privacy controls in Mash and you set the boundaries that you’re comfortable with,” said Yahoo Mash developer Will Aldrich.

Currently Mash is in a beta stage and it is open only to people who have received an invitation. Those enrolled in Mash can also send invites to any other Yahoo user, much in the same fashion as when Google’s Gmail service first launched.

This is not the first entry into social networking for the online company. Yahoo 360 in the early part of 2005, but it failed to capture much of the fire that spread into Myspace and Facebook. Yahoo has not announced any plans to shut down Yahoo 360, so for now both it and Mash are actively supported.

MASH

Mash is currently an invitation-only beta service.The odds are good that one of your friends is in here already. Hit them up for an invite!

Already Mashing? Sign in.

You need invitation to use it in Beta

Bebo Adds Yahoo as a Friend

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 13.09.2007 | Category Internet News, Yahoo

Yahoo’s corporate culture is about caution and measured risks. And so it is perfectly in keeping with the way the company has been run that it announced today that it has been chosen to sell advertising in the United Kingdom and Ireland for Bebo, the most popular social network in Britain.

These days the competition to sell ads for big Web sites is a very dangerous game. Google right now can earn more selling ads on a given site than any of its rivals. It has better technology, more sites and more advertisers bidding, which creates a virtuous circle bidding up prices. The only way for Microsoft and Yahoo to break in is to build better advertising systems — which they are doing — and get bigger networks, which in turn will draw more advertisers.

Google knows that its rivals have an incentive to lose money on some big deals just to get scale, so it too has been overbidding to keep plum sites out of their hands. The biggest example was MySpace, where Google promised $900 million over three years, far more than it expected to earn, according to people involved in the negotiations. Microsoft, which has more cash than Fort Knox, later won the contract to sell ads on Facebook.

Yahoo looked at these deals, but just couldn’t face saying goodbye to so much money. It’s hard to imagine that the underlying economics are any different in the case of Bebo — I’m sure both Google and Microsoft would bid. The terms were not disclosed, but the scale is smaller, so what I assume will be a loss for Yahoo will be easier for it to swallow.

Yahoo Buys Stake inTyroo an Indian Online ad Company

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 19.07.2007 | Category Contextual Advertising, Internet Marketing, Internet News, Yahoo

Yahoo has acquired a stake in Indian Internet advertising company Tyroo Media to help it capture more of the country’s fast-growing online ad market.

Yahoo acquired between 35 percent and 50 percent of Tyroo for an undisclosed amount of money, said George Zacharias, managing director of Yahoo India, in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Yahoo hopes Tyroo Media will help it capture more of India’s fast-growing online ad market

Yahoo acquired between 35 percent and 50 percent of Tyroo for an undisclosed amount of money, said George Zacharias, managing director of Yahoo India, in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Tyroo, based in Gurgaon, places advertisements on a network of about 1,200 Web sites. Its service is suitable for smaller businesses, allowing them to design graphic or text-based ads and choose Web sites that will bring them a targeted audience, said Harish Bahl, CEO of Smile Interactive Technologies Group, of which Tyroo is a part.

The advertisers do not need to have their own Web sites — which small Indian businesses often do not have — since buyers can contact them via e-mail or SMS (short messaging service), he said.

Yahoo started its search-based advertising business in India about eight months ago and so far has a few thousand small advertisers, Zacharias said. There are millions of potential advertisers in India, which all the search companies and advertising networks are chasing, he added.

The deal with Tyroo will allow Yahoo to grow its business with third-party publishers in India while it prepares to bring its revamped advertising system, code-named Panama, into the country, along with technology it acquired from Right Media, Zacharias said.

Yahoo announced in April that it would buy the remainder of Right Media, an online exchange where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell display advertising on Web sites. The relationship with Tyroo will continue after the Panama and Right Media technologies are introduced to India, Zacharias said.

The companies will also integrate their back-end systems so that advertisers on Yahoo and Tyroo can access to each other’s networks, Bahl said. The companies will remain independent, however, he added.

The news comes a day after Yahoo reported disappointing financial results for its second quarter. Net income declined to $161 million, or $0.11 per share, down slightly from $164 million, or $0.11 per share, for the same period in 2006.

Yahoo net income fell year-over-year in a quarter that saw Yahoo leadership change hands amid criticism that the company failed to capitalize on the explosive growth of the search-engine advertising market. Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs was $1.2 billion. The company lowered its earnings guidance for the current quarter.

Yahoo ‘07 2nd Quarter Revenues Rise 8%

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 19.07.2007 | Category Internet Marketing, Internet News, Yahoo

Yahoo said today that its net income for the second quarter was $161 million… almost unchanged from the same period a year ago, as revenues rose 8 percent to $1.7 billion.

…The quarterly results reflect gains from Yahoo’s new advertising system, known internally as Project Panama, which is helping the company increase the ad revenue it earns for every search query. But Yahoo’s gains from Panama were largely erased by weakness in display advertising…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/technology/17cnd-yahoo.html?pagewanted=print

Yahoo! Search Marketing Coupon: $100

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 18.07.2007 | Category Contextual Advertising, Yahoo, Yahoo! Publisher Network

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v10.php?o=US1851&cmp=YahooHL&ctv=FPPanPI&s=Y&s2=FP&b=50
Sign up today for Yahoo! Search Marketing, and you get a $50 free PPC credit

Offer open to new Sponsored Search advertisers only. (A new advertiser is one who has not advertised with Yahoo! Search Marketing for the past 13 months). Each account requires a nonrefundable $5 initial deposit. Advertisers signing up for Self Serve will receive a $0 credit into the account. Advertisers signing up for the Assisted Setup service will receive $0 off the $199 service charge. In each case, initial credits are nonrefundable and will be applied to click charges. There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click-through. Limit one offer per customer, and one use per customer on a single account. Sellers of certain legally restricted products may require third party certification at extra cost. Search listings subject to editorial review. Offer may not be combined with any other offers or discounts, separated, redeemed for cash, or transferred. Other terms and conditions may apply; see Advertiser Terms and Conditions when you sign up.