We don’t always cover search industry news as we’d rather not just repeat what the other blogs are saying. Today’s a bit different though, the story of Microsoft and Yahoo!’s new 10-year search agreement deal is massive news!

Image credit: gnal

In case you’ve managed to miss it, here’s the latest news from around the blogosphere:

• It’s Finally Official, Microsoft & Yahoo Make A Deal, Yahoo Gives Up On Search – Search Engine Land
• Live Blogging The MSFT – YHOO Search Press Conference – Search Engine Land
• Microsoft, Yahoo Search Deal is Official – Search Engine Journal
• Yahoo Search Powered By Microsoft Bing: What SEMs Need To Know – Search Engine Roundtable
• Five things you need to know about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal – Brand Republic
• Does Bing/Yahoo Click-Through beats Google’s? – Search Cowboys
• Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal – BBC

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Dell has been an early adopter of social media tools. Other than Apple that uses them for creating hype Dell uses social media in the direct business sense: They use Twitter to make money via direct sales among others.
In 2008 Dell managed to earn 2 million in revenue on Twitter which is a considerable amount unless you compare it to the overall revenue. In 2008 the Dell revenue was 61,1 billion dollars. So at the end of the day it’s not much for such an international corporation.
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Roughly two weeks ago I elaborated on the 10 non-Google SEO ways to promote your business online in 2009 and presented a list of 35 non-Google SEO how tos, tutorials & other resources. They covered only half of the strategies I suggested as the non-Google SEO ways.

Today I collected links for the remaining 5 non-Google SEO strategies:

1. Shopping search engines
2. Yahoo Answers
3. Review sites
4. Local sites and local search
5. Niche communities

Continue Reading »

The Road to Tomorrow (and Happy 2009!). Creative Commons license by Stuck in Customs.

While Twitter has become the perhaps single most important social site for marketers this year it’s time to reevaluate the ways to promote your business online in 2009.

Are the methods we used in 2008 still valid? Do they still work? Or do we have to adapt again in 2009 to a whole new Web? Moreover: Which ways outside the Google search moloch are there? Continue Reading »

And they’re off… Again. More soap opera and cynicism erupts from three of the top performing search engines as Yahoo! sheds executives almost as fast as share value and Microsoft grumbles about Google being “anti-competitive”. Who needs WWE when you have giants like this wrestling each day?

Last week, Yahoo! lost even more top executives; Joshua Schachter (he of Delicious origin) and Brad Garlinghouse – this follows recent announcements from Caterina Fake and Steward Butterfield (of Flickr foundings), as well as search advertising exec Qi Lu and senior vice-president of search Vish Makhijani.

These names may mean little to anyone who does not follow the search scene but one thing which should be pretty obvious is that such a brain drain happening so quickly is unlikely to bode well for the engine. I would go so far as to say that Yahoo! is breaking apart and – without fast action soon – could lose its edge and its long-secure place as the world’s second most popular search engine.

It interests me, however, that the disintegration of Yahoo! is not being caused by any drop off in search engine figures. The number of people using search engines rises steadily; if Yahoo! ceases to be a main portal then MSN and Google will mop up their traffic. Search tools remain the best way for consumers to find their way around the web and if Yahoo! breaks, it will be as a result of self-destruction.

I’ve just noticed this morning that Yahoo! Site Explorer now allows you to filter indexed pages and inbound links by subdomain. Screenshots below.

Show Inlinks expect from this subdomain:

Show pages from: All Subdomains:

This looks like a useful report for websites which use multiple subdomains, enabling the option to remove internal subdomain links while still counting all other links from the same domain.

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this! :)

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?

A couple of weeks ago I reported that Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland launched in beta, today I noticed that they have also rolled out a country specific Yahoo! Site Explorer for a wider range of countries.

So far I’ve noticed this for Germany, Australia, Spain, France and Italy. Looking at the results returned for inbound links these are returning different counts and appear to be heavily weighted towards inbound links from each specific country.

Following on from my original example which looked at links for www.bbc.co.uk, here are the results for the same search on Yahoo! Site Explorer Germany:

Yahoo!7 Site Explorer Australia shows a different set of results, many of which are from .au domains as opposed to .de from the German search or .it from the Italian results etc…

These results can certainly be useful if you are looking to find country specific links which may be influencing competitor rankings in google.com.au for example.

I noticed today that Yahoo! have launched Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland in beta. There seems to be no official announcement (or any other information on the web about this yet!) so I would guess it’s been released in the last couple of days.

Here are the results for an external inbound link search for www.bbc.co.uk:
Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland: 1,575,969
Yahoo! Site Explorer: 11,400,000

The reason for the fewer number of links on Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland seems to be because this is very UK focused, some non-UK links are listed but this mainly contains inbound links from .co.uk and UK hosted .com’s. These also seem to be ordered with strong UK and Irish links at the top of the page:

This could become very useful for UK-based competitor backlink analysis! ;)

Launching this week Yahoo Buzz is a Digg style service that works with a closed list of 100 sites that Yahoo has handpicked.

The most interesting part of the service is that the most popular stories will be promoted to the Yahoo homepage! Apparently a Wired story that was featured on the Yahoo.com homepage received 2 million unique visitors within 2 hours.

Yahoo will rotate stories that make the homepage and hopefully will be monitoring the traffic they send otherwise small sites will crash very quickly.