All posts in yahoo

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.

Apparently Microsoft might be buying Yahoo, a move that would have quite a big effect on SEO.

If the deal goes through then Microsoft is likely to pool the search algorithms and create something that can really rival Google. They would have a ready made market share and could pose a threat over the long term. In the UK I don’t think anybody would notice because Google is too far ahead but in the US the effect would be much larger.

Yahoo is apparently in the process of integrating del.icio.us tags into their search results but I don’t think anybody in the UK will actually notice. Hitwise has reported that Yahoo has less than 2.05% market share over here now and don’t even feature in the top 4 search engines any more.

Most people in the UK only ever consider using Google to search. Some know about other search engines and are put off by the number of adverts, a lot say Google is just a better search engine.

Whatever the result it’s clear that even if Yahoo and MSN do something really amazing they can’t beat Google because not enough people know about them over here. The average web surfer wants nothing more than to find stuff, quickly. How can anybody compete with Google in this climate?

Google has always done very well by having a clean and uncluttered homepage. The usability aspects of this are made even more obvious when you compare results from a competitive search query such as “mobile phones” across both Yahoo and Google.

As you can see from the screenshots Yahoo only manages to fit 2 natural listings before the fold on my 22 inch monitor whereas Google has 6 results showing. This is why Google will always be most peoples favourite search engine and also why you don’t want to be outside the top 2 results on Yahoo.

301 Redirect Results – 2 Weeks Later


By On August 9, 2007 In google, seo, yahoo With Comments Off

A couple of weeks ago I setup a 301 redirect for ukgoogleconsultant.co.uk (an old domain I used ages ago), redirecting this to a new Google consultant webpage on the seoptimise.com domain instead.

Two weeks later here are the results:

Google

Yahoo!

  • Old domain homepage still indexed, internal pages have disappeared though.
  • New webpage also indexed.
  • The old domain is still ranking in Yahoo at #5. Yahoo! seems to take ages redirecting pages, the current #1 result for this search is a Wikipedia entry for Google consultant which was redirected to their search engine optimization page around 6 months ago!

Windows Live

  • New page indexed
  • Old domain has 2 remaining webpages indexed, one of them the homepage.
  • New version is the one appearing for live.com searches, which is still at #1.

So far I haven’t seen any other ranking increases throughout the seoptimise.com domain as a result of the redirect, but to be honest I wouldn’t have really expected this to have a noticeable effect anyway.

Having only submitted this site to Yahoo Site Explorer last week I was surprised to find some nice extra features which I hadn’t expected today.

Here’s a screenshot of the stats for www.seoptimise.com:
Yahoo Feature 1

Just in case anyone else has taken as long as me, and perhaps didn’t see the point in submitting to Yahoo Site Explorer, here are 5 good reasons why you should authenticate your site:

1) Language information
Make sure Yahoo! knows the correct language of your website.

2) Last crawl date
When viewing your own site’s page’s you are listed with a date/time stamp for when each page was last crawled.

3) Subdomains
View the different subdomains Yahoo have indexed for your website.

4) Getting a new site indexed
For websites having problems with getting indexed in Yahoo! submiting to Yahoo Site Explorer can help to speed up the process.

5) Submit a site feed
Make sure Yahoo! finds your latest blog posts quickly by submitting your RSS site feed.

It looks like there’s been an update to Yahoo Site Explorer links today, I’ve noticed a large increase in inbound links for a number of different sites.

I first found that seoptimise.com had increased to 12,779 from around 10,000 which is great! :) But I’m not the only one, last week I noted down the total number of links for Digg, SEOmoz, Pronet Advertising and Tropical SEO and they have all received substantal increases too, maybe this is because they’re counting all the extra email links! :)

Digg: 80,581,285 -> 96,274,838
SEOmoz: 512,025 -> 700,970
Pronet Advertising: 198,313 -> 225,616
Tropical SEO: 13,803 -> 17,600

I just noticed that for all link searches you can only view the first 1,000 inbound links, I don’t think I’ve ever checked that far down before though so not sure if there’s always been a limit to this.

Maybe Yahoo! have agreed a deal with Facebook after all. Or more likely, my Internet Explorer browser is trying to trick me into blogging about a rumour which ended a while ago :)

Yahoo! Favicon Appearing for Facebook!

It’s quite interesting that of all the .ico images that could have been mixed up the Yahoo one was used, even a new window and a CTRL+F5 page refresh doesn’t fix it, but everything’s fine in FireFox. Also if anyone knows how I can set MSN Messenger to open my Hotmail account using my default browser instead of a new IE window please let me know, I don’t think Microsoft have made that too easy though! ;)

Yahoo! Online Reputation Management


By On March 18, 2007 In seo, yahoo With Comments Off

Last month I noticed some strange Yahoo! results when searching for SEOptimise. This was listing all results related to “soroptimist” rather than anything to do with this website.

Since then I’ve been working on my own online reputation project by building up some social media profiles, signing up for some new forums and submiting the site to some new directories with business profile pages. In addition to this I have also purchased a Yahoo! Directory listing which I expect has been the biggest, single factor in controlling the search results for my company name. While performing this search on Yahoo.com today 9,880 SEOptimise results were returned instead of a list of soroptimist SERPs, this still included a suggestion of “Did you mean: soroptimist” but I prefer these results much better!

Google & Yahoo! Backlink Updates


By On March 8, 2007 In google, seo, yahoo With Comments Off

As reported by Search Engine Roundtable yesterday, there has recently been a link count update for both Yahoo! and Google Webmaster Central.

This has shown an increase from around 6,500 external links (although this was about 11,000 before dropping significantly a couple of weeks ago) for seoptimise.com to 12,391 on Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central has also shown an increase with 10,653 links now counted.

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