So Yahoo is planning to cut a load of jobs to increase its own profits…hmmm and gain more focus to crucial areas. Well I think it’s a shame, surely a collective number of people working on new ideas in search and actively developing the engine has to be better than reducing jobs… but of course it’s really all about profits.

Yahoo say they want to be a starting point for consumers whilst extending other offerings such as advertising and opening up their technology.

Their areas of focus hardly seem revolutionary ? How about trying something original…

I think its standard now that Search Engines mark the in a different colour
SPONSOR RESULTS

Google’s SPONSOR RESULTS are Yellow

Live.com’s SPONSOR RESULTS are Grey

Ask’s SPONSOR RESULTS are Blue

Yahoo is Normally blue except when you are a partner Like “The Guardian”,

WTF 6 ADS all blended to look like Organic.. shame on you Yahoo !

DaveN

Ok so Yahoo has quite a nice Aff offer at the moment :

Start with £50 credit in your new Yahoo! Search Marketing account for a limited period only.

and the kick back is Very Good too !

Yahoo! Search Marketing UK Terms and Conditions July 2007

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s policy on PPC (Pay-per-Click) search engines including Miva, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google and any other search engine that offers full or partial Pay-per-Click advertising

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s policy regarding the protection of our brand name in association with PPC is as follows. Affiliates who are part of the Yahoo! Search Marketing affiliate programme with Commission Junction will be prohibited from the following:

1. Using Yahoo! Search Marketing’s brand name, brand name misspellings or similar variations in the written copy of adverts on PPC search engines.

2. Using Yahoo! Search Marketing’s brand names, brand name misspellings or similar variations as keywords or key phrases for the purposes of targeting adverts on PPC search engines.

3. Using Overture’s brand name, brand name misspellings or similar variations in the written copy of adverts on PPC search engines.

4. Using Overture’s brand names, brand name misspellings or similar variations as keywords or key phrases for the purposes of targeting adverts on PPC search engines.

Any affiliates found to be in breach of any of the above will be put on notice and if this process continues this may result in their account being permanently excluded from the program.

Google is big and it’s official by powering over 1/2 of the search requests in the WORLD for the month of August it’s steaming ahead.

For August Google has 37 billion searches compared to Yahoo at 8.5 billion and Microsoft 2.1 Billion.

Think about that traffic volume immense…  It also seems most search traffic comes from Asia-Pacific whereas Middle East Africa generates the least.

Dan Horton

Added: Greg Sterling at SEL has a better write up here

Please correct me if I’m wrong but did Yahoo just add a funky little bit of ajax so related keywords…

screenshots :

Yahoo related search terms up:

Yahoo related search terms down:

or this the facelift model, with super cool search assist ?
DaveN

Remember, I wrote about bodog and the fact they had lost all their Domains well those domains where dead i thought .. hmmm wonder how quick they will get flushed ….

Well checkout :

Live : Bodog
Yahoo : Bodog
Google : Bodog

ok maybe it’s only Google that read my blog, well if that the case way to go.. ( btw I know it’s not only Google ;) ), but just look at the speed that those results was swapped out .. 10/10 for Google

DaveN

Well not in my office anyway, so Google say Paid Links to influence search are evil and of course they would, they’re a search engine that’s sells links via JS, don’t we can’t really take a leaf out of google book, because the main traffic pages are robots.txt’d out.. oh the dilemma.

so how can you buy links and not get caught, well first off you could test the links..

but for a site / page that doesn’t matter if page move up by another link for the master site or better ask for the link to be change to master site, again if site moves down pass that link to a competitor.. yer i know it’s dirty and underhand but I still have site pinned down because a competitor buy me links.. cheers, but remember what goes around comes around..

but I guess the really answer is when buying link make dam sure Google has to ask it’s self what was the intent and are we 60% sure it was purchased for improving search rankings.

here is something that happened just recently, a Guy rang me up and said his site had lost all traffic from Google, and he hadn’t used any SEO’s and did his own PPC, in fact his site had no spam on it and was pretty under optimised.

Before I jumped in I asked the guy how he markets his website, this took me by surprise the Guy used Hitwise and monitored his competitors, and basically used PPC to clone those sites keywords, One day he found that one of his competitors was getting quite a bit of upstream traffic from a Site, so he went there and found to his surprise that the competitor didn’t advertise on the site, but he did have a text link, so he emailed the site and bought his link right next to the competitor, and so it went on and on every time he saw upstream data he went and purchased the same has his competitors.

Until a few days ago when he rang me.. at first I joked and said Google had banned him because they wanted all his advertising spend.. guess what that’s what he thought too .. I told him that wasn’t the case and he had been hit for link buying and he should stop and ask Googles forgiveness.

At the moment he is testing YPN and ADcenter and looking at stopping using Google, I think the guy has balls he actually wants to see if he can survive without Google. Me I’m going to help the Dude for free just so I get the data ..

what you reckon fail or succeed, btw he had his best day ever today thankyou stumble upon :)

Recently i was looking at Yahoo! Taiwan, the thing that really jumped out was the RED Text for the search terms.. wonder if this is coming to other Yahoo serps, can anyone tell me if this is a test or has Yahoo! Taiwan always had the red text

Dave Naylor serps in Taiwan

Screen Shot

LeeAnn Prescott the Research Director at Hitwise, reports on the increase in traffic to Flickr when yahoo pictures closed down,

if you don’t read Hitwises blog … shame on you, anyway Flickr is the number 2 image site in the world now,

so in the words of the Great MC Hammer to Eric Shmidt

Can’t touch this
Can’t touch this
Break it down!
(Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
(Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh)
Stop! time!

DaveN

So Semel steps down, we wait with baited breath what will happen next, my views and hopes ..

Logo : please Drop the red logo, get in tune with your young surfers

These Logos are so much better

Yahoo Search Index Problems :

stopping indexing the redirects, the tinyurl style stuff in the UK is killing you,
stop indexing things like the Google PDA searchresults

Ok the future :

I think that Yahoo now needs to lead by example, get it’s search engine in line, more relevant and actual results, maybe try some new ideas in winning the hearts and minds over of the next generation of searches, get into the preschool kids, develop relationships with schools, give them computers that are locked down to safe search and develop a Yahoo Safe Search for schools, get the Y! Brand in front of kids. My 7 year old son would never of heard of Yahoo or MSN if it wasn’t for me, the school teachers are Google fans and trust only in that search. It’s wrong I know they should be teaching my kids that there is more options than Google, but at present the teachers need re-educating. Yahoo could do this.

DaveN