Yahoo

Yahoo! Takes Control of Right Media Today For $700 Million

Sunday, July 15th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Internet News, Yahoo, Yahoo! Publisher Network | No Comments

Yahoo took control of online advertising exchange Right Media. on Thursday, giving the slumping Internet portal a head start on rivals Google and Microsoft in a heated race to build more powerful marketing vehicles.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is counting on its nearly $700 million acquisition of Right Media to help sell more Internet ads that rely on graphics and other visuals — a format expected to become increasingly popular as companies promote brands online instead of television, magazines and newspapers.

Google has relied largely on short, text-based messages to establish the Internet’s largest ad network so far.

In anticipation of greater demand for more dynamic ads, Google and Microsoft are buying services that help distribute graphical advertising on the Web.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick. for $3.1 billion. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft plans to take over aQuantive for $6 billion.

Microsoft’s deal is expected to close in about a month. But Google’s deal has bogged down in a regulatory review that could drag on for several more months as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission examines whether the proposed DoubleClick deal would stifle competition in the rapidly growing online ad market.

The delay could help both Microsoft and Yahoo as they try to close the gap with the world’s biggest search engine, said Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of online ad service Specific Media.

“I think they are very excited about Google and DoubleClick deal being tied up because it gives them more time to try to catch up,” Vanderhook said.

Yahoo’s inability to keep pace with Google has hammered its stock price, which plummeted 31% since late 2005. Yahoo shares gained 27 cents to $26.96 Thursday.

Once the smaller of the two companies, Google makes more money in three months than Yahoo does in an entire year. Both companies release second-quarter results next week.

In an attempt to regain its stride, Yahoo last month named co-founder Jerry Yang to replace Chairman Terry Semel as chief executive.

Yahoo acquired a 20% stake in Right Media last October for a reported $40 million. The New York-based company runs a system that allows Web publishers to auction advertising space to the highest bidder. Right Media typically collects a 7% commission.

Two weeks after Google agreed to buy DoubleClick in April, Yahoo announced it was buying the rest of Right Media for $680 million. By the time the cash-and-stock deal closed, the final price for the remaining 80% stake in Right Media had fallen to $650 million because of Yahoo’s skidding stock.

Yahoo Adds SmartAds To Ad Tools

Sunday, July 15th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Yahoo, Yahoo! Publisher Network | No Comments

Yahoo is due to unveil on Monday a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income.

“It starts to marry the concept of targeting … with the construction of the ad,” Todd Teresi, Yahoo’s senior vice president of display marketplaces, told Reuters.

The aim, he said, is for “consumers to view advertising to be as relevant as the content they’re looking at.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSSP25867220070702

Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

…webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won’t use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a “nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike “cloaking” where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

It is not clear though whether slurp will follow the links within class=”robots-nocontent”.
Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag
and
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html

Yahoo to Shut Yahoo Photos Service, Pushing Flickr

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Yahoo | 1 Comment

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said.

In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo’s Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.

Outside sites include PhotoBucket — the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research MySpace — or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery (EK.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY.O: Quote, Profile, Research or Snapfish, he said.

“Flickr will get top-billing, of course,” Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives.

Butterfield and co-founder Caterina Fake, his wife, sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield is now a director of product management at Yahoo.

Later, Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division, said in a company statement: “We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo!’s resources and focus on core strategic priorities.”

“Part of this progress is today’s decision to close Yahoo! Photos to better serve our valued customers through Flickr.”

Yahoo’s move follows the explosive surge in growth by PhotoBucket, an independent photo storage site based in Palo Alto, California, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 percent last month, according to Hitwise Inc. data.

In the same period, Yahoo Photos’ share has been cut two- to three times over to around 5.8 percent of the U.S. market. Flickr, meanwhile, has grown to 4.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent, according to Hitwise U.S. Web audience data.

Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.

Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.

By contrast, PhotoBucket rose to 32 million users in 2006 from 12 million users in 2005. It is set to grow to around 62 million users by the end of 2007, PhotoBucket Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Welch said in a recent interview.

Yahoo and Microsoft Planning Merger Talks?

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN, Yahoo | 1 Comment

We’ve seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google’s plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we’ve got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It’s being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there’s not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It’s not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester’s Charlene Li says it’s a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. “Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won’t be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared.”

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. “If it doesn’t, both Yahoo and MSN will die,” he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: “Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It’s not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions.”

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

Five dangerous SEO tools in the hands of the New optimizer

Monday, April 23rd, 2007 | Google, Internet Marketing, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Yahoo | No Comments

You know the tools, the ones that the uninformed… or barely informed… take as gospel when it comes to search engine optimization. These tools in the hands of your client… or worse, a really bad SEO who is trying to steal a client… can be a deadly thing. And worse, because they used to be useful once upon a time, most of these tools are the ones that people have heard of.

Is your client measuring your success on how much the site’s Alexa ranking goes up or down? Or using an automated rank checker program, ala Web Position Gold, to check the Google positioning for his top fifty chosen keywords every hour on the hour? Here are the tools and programs that can be oh-so-dangerous in the hands of the SEO uneducated.

Alexa Ranking
Alexa ranking isn’t perfect. In fact, it is very far from it because of the way it measures a site’s traffic… by only counting those who are visiting the site with either an Alexa toolbar or an Alexa browser plugin. So numbers can be manipulated in so many ways to make the site’s Alexa rank seem better or worse than it should.

Google PageRank
What’s your PageRank? Unfortunately, while Google PR does have its uses, many people place too much importance on what number is in that little green bar, particularly when it goes up or down with those infrequent PageRank updates. And some site owners seem more obsessed with what their PR is rather than what their actual rankings are. Funny that, considering only one is usually related to ROI, unless you happen to be selling text links!

Automated Rank Checkers
A cringe worthy situation is when you are talking about the site’s rankings with your client and he says “Oh yes, I’ve been running a program to check our rankings every hour on our top list of fifty keywords so I can check how you are doing on an hourly basis.” So not only does your client feel the need to analyze how you are doing on an hourly basis, but also those automated queries are also one of the thou shalt not do commandments in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Oops.

Site:
When companies are paying top dollar for their search engine optimization, they can become a little bit obsessed with how many pages they have indexed, even when there are obvious problems with Google’s site search at the moment using site: such as the 260 error. And of course, there are fluctuations depending on what dataserver is hit or even the physical location of the surfer.

Link:
Which brings us to checking backlinks in Google (or Yahoo). Backlinks are notoriously slow at updating in Google using the link: command, and are even more notorious for being so incomplete… which is a good thing if you have snoopy competitors wanting to mimic your backlink campaigns for their own sites. But for a client wanting to see the fruits of your linking efforts (or to see what their link budget is paying for), it can definitely seem like things just aren’t happening.

These are definitely the tools that SEOs love to hate, although granted, each of them still offers at least a grain of usefulness even today. Yes, we all check PageRank, but just because a competitor has a PR6 site doesn’t mean they are ranking better than your PR4 or PR5 site. Likewise, a site with an Alexa ranking of 1000 may have far less traffic than an Alexa 10,000 or 100,000 site or may convert much worse. So while they have their uses, they should never be viewed as a be all, end all of search engine optimization.

At the end of the day, all that really matters is what position you are in the search engines for your chosen keywords and how much traffic is being driven to your site, not if you are in the Alexa top 1000 or if Google says you have 260 pages indexed. So when someone talks about how great (or poor) their Alexa, PageRank, backlink numbers or how many pages they have indexed, remind them that it is traffic that brings in the money at the end of the day and that is where the optimization focus should be.

Is link bait dying as a search engine optimization technique?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Google, Link Building, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

Whether you love it or hate it, link bait has been going strong for about a year now, with webmasters and bloggers carefully crafting titles and articles for the maximum amount of link baiting goodness. But like all SEO techniques that webmasters run wild with until it is done to death, is link bait due to be exterminated as a usable technique?

Link bait has two primary uses for webmasters looking to promote a site. First is the initial wave of traffic that a hot link baited article can bring. When people start linking and talking about your article, the traffic comes albeit through linkage from other blogs, through social media such as Digg and through blog search engines such as Technorati. However, within a day or two, this traffic trickles off to next to nothing.

Then comes the true SEO aspect of a successful link bait article… the boost that all those deep links give to the page and the site overall. This helps the blog rank higher in the search engines and contributes to increasing PageRank. It is an extremely useful technique… in fact, there are search engine optimization companies that only take on clients who have good link bait-ability.

But like any hot SEO technique, as soon as it starts getting done to death - as arguably link bait is now - the powers that be at Google simply turn one of those many shiny knobs and suddenly the technique starts to count less and less in the serps until those link bait links don’t seem to add anything at all. Or worse, sites utilizing it to an extreme level get penalized.

So is link bait as an SEO technique at the end of its days? Definitely. And the writing has been on the wall for several months now.

Remember the whole miserable failure Google bombing? With Google bombing, a large number of bloggers link to the same page with the identical anchor text so that the destination page will (hopefully) rank for their chosen phrase. Well, Google tweaked their algo so that Google bombing would no longer impact the search results (although Google bombing is ironically alive and well in Yahoo & MSN).

So if Google can combat Google bombing, which is a lot of bloggers linking to the same page within a short time frame, who is to say that they won’t apply the same thing to trip a filter or penalty when a blog has a large number of deep links coming into a single page in a short period of time? Link bait would still work well for the social aspect of it, but for Google at least, the ranking boost would no longer factor into it.

If link bait stopped working as a SEO technique, would people still do it? You bet. There is definitely the ego boost and the stardust factor people get when everyone is linking to them and talking about what they wrote. There will still be those who get their kicks from seeing how many times they can make the front page of Digg in a week or if they can be the first to blog about some exploit in Google or Yahoo that gets everyone saying how great they are. So from that perspective, link baiting will be around for a long time to come.

And my gut feeling? It is only a matter of time - if it hasn’t started already, that is. It could be a sudden thing that gets all the bloggers screaming at once, but I suspect it would be more of a gradual dampening, something that could easily be attributed to one of the few dozen other algo components that make up the Google secret sauce. But my guess is this time next year, link baiting will be dead as a search engine optimization technique.

Do you really need meta tags?

Sunday, April 8th, 2007 | Google, Microsoft & MSN, SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

A couple of years ago, using meta tags definitely fell out of style. They went from being near the top of every search engine optimiser’s to do list to being dropped right off the bottom and added to a site more as an afterthought than a SEO technique. True, they stopped being the sure-fire SEO technique they were several years ago, but should they really have been relegated to non-existence? Definitely not.

Even today, however, marketers are confused about what meta tags are actually good for, especially with so many people saying meta tags are useless and not to add them. But then add to that the fact that Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have stepped up to add new meta tags into the mix in the past year to allow webmasters to customize how their sites are displayed in the search results. So here is what meta tags are still useful for in 2007, and why you should be using them.

First and foremost, Google sometimes uses the description you place in the meta description tag as the snippet when certain criteria is met. This sometimes includes site search or keyword searches when keyword(s) that are searched for also are contained within the meta description.

The meta robots tag is useful for excluding certain pages from being indexed by bots. When you don’t want to use the robots.txt file for excluding bots, such as you don’t want to alert competitors to a specific directory you have on you site, the robots meta tag comes in quite handy. It is also good for those who are still terrified of somehow screwing up a robots.txt file and inadvertently blocking all the bots from an entire site, even though there are plenty of robots.txt checkers out there now.

There is also the fairly new NOODP tag. If your site is listed in the ODP directory (aka DMOZ) with a less-than-desirable description, using the ODP tag will tell MSN (which started this one), Google and Yahoo that you prefer that description not be used for your snippet.

Likewise, Yahoo also allows webmasters to use the NOYDIR meta tag, which tells Yahoo to not use your Yahoo Directory description as the snippet in Yahoo search results.

Preventing a cache copy being taken is another use for meta tags. While this tag is definitely useful in certain circumstances, do keep in mind that using no-cache can be a signal of spam, since most spammers prefer you see what they serve you and not what they actually dished up to Google (or Yahoo or MSN) to get there.

Using AdSense? There is definite evidence that your meta description and keywords can be an influential factor in ad targeting, so using this can help to get highly targeted ads.

In the grand scheme of things, you can leave all meta tags off your website and still rank well in the major search engines. But they can help in the search results, and even if it just gives you the smallest boost in your rankings, it is worth adding them to your page. But meta tags still have their uses, even if it isn’t a strong part of the ranking algorithm, so it is worth taking the extra 30 seconds and adding any relevant meta tags to your page when you create it, or spending some time to go through an older site without any meta’s and adding them.

Yahoo names click fraud czar

Saturday, March 24th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Yahoo, Yahoo! Publisher Network | No Comments

Yahoo has promoted one of its staff attorneys to an executive-level position that is akin to being click fraud czar at the second largest Web search provider.

For seven years, Reggie Davis helped the Web search company defend itself against lawsuits by advertisers who claimed they were overcharged for pay-per-click ads that resulted from click fraud. Click fraud occurs when clicks are generated by people paid to click ads over and over or by automated software programs, usually for the purpose of boosting revenue for the Web site the ads appear on.

Now, Davis is the company’s first vice president of marketplace quality, responsible for reducing the amount of click fraud and making sure advertisers and publishers are happy with the company’s display and search listings.

from CNET News.com

Yahoo Launches “Suggestion Board” Facility With Digg-Like Look

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 | Internet News, Yahoo | No Comments

Yahoo has launched its “Suggestion Board” with Digg-like interface. http://suggestions.yahoo.com/landing/?prop=autos

I wonder how long that interface will remain as it is.

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