Category Archives: Yahoo!

Confirmed: Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion

This day has come my friends. Microsoft just offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion, or $31 a share. According to the press release:

Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

This could be huge and really shakes up the search industry. Go for it Yahoo! !!!

Yahoo! Is Really Getting Serious About Mobile Search

Last week, Yahoo! proudly announced that their mobile search service (downloadable application) called OneSearch was now available on more than 85% of US phones.

In the meantime, they also wanted to show everyone how good OneSearch was, by comparing it with Google. A report called “Dare to Compare” is linked from their homepage and is available there .

After showing off its new mobile search engine, Yahoo! now announces the launch of its Mobile Publish Services, “a suite of services designed to enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content on mobile phones”. These services will be available on this website (nothing there yet).

This is good news for advertisers wanting to reach more customers through mobile devices.

Here are the new services that publishers will have access to in the 2nd quarter of 2007 and in 19 countries:

Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network

The Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network will allow mobile publishers to have syndicated advertising served on their mobile content and services. Publishers will be able to select the ad formats they want to have run, such as display, sponsored links, video or in-game placements.

Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine

The Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine will enable publishers to bring their content to Yahoo!’s mobile audience. It will also help enable publishers who do not have a mobile site or only have a limited mobile offering to quickly distribute their content to consumers on their mobile phones.

Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory

The Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory will allow publishers to make their mobile media content accessible directly through Yahoo! oneSearch. Publishers could submit a catalog of their content such as ringtones, games, video and applications.

Let’s break these walled gardens! Yahoo will now allow users to search for mobile content outside of their operator’s Wap portal.

Yahoo! Mobile Site Submit

The Yahoo! Mobile Site Submit will allow publishers to provide information about their mobile site, such as a description and relevant tags, to ensure that their sites are accurately indexed and available to consumers through Yahoo! oneSearch. For example, a hotel could submit their mobile site, including description and tag, enabling weekend travelers to find their location and see if they still have rooms available through Yahoo! oneSearch.

I don’t know what they mean with “tags”. Maybe they will allow people to submit XML feeds of their content, with something similar to Google Base.

With all these new services, Yahoo! is really showing everyone that they’re serious about mobile search. Google might be very quiet at the moment, but you can expect them to get more aggressive as well in the next few months.

Take That Google! Yahoo and IBM to Offer Free Enterprise Search

How can you differentiate from a competitor in order to gain more market share? Sometimes, a company can take a pricing decision that can boost its sales but also generate a positive response amongst their customers.

A good example is Yahoo and IBM who just announced that they teamed up in order to provide a free enterprise search tool.  Their goal was to develop an enterprise search tool for companies that don’t have the budget to buy a solution such as Google’s Enterprise Solutions (with Mini for small businesses, and Google Search Appliance for medium and large ones), Fast, or any other paid search tool.

Besides being free, Yahoo and IBM solution, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition has got some excellent features:

• Indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages.

• Customizable search results interface

• Add new synonyms.

• Create your own featured links.

You couldn’t even get those features for $1995 with Google Mini 🙂 More information about IMB Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (maybe they should get a shorter name…) can be found here.

Lee Odden interviews Laura Lippay – Yahoo SEO Program Manager

Lee Odden just published an excellent interview he did with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first heard about Laura on CNet, when I saw her excellent SEO 101 video (she’s cute, isn’t she?). You may also have seen her posting smart comments/posts at SEOMoz, Highrankings forums , or Cre8asiteforums.
The best part of the interview is this one:

If there were 3-5 site optimization tips you were to recommend to web masters, what would they be?
1. Usability comes before SEO – better yet, they should work hand in hand. But don’t compromise your user experience for SEO. Unless you’re spamming, of course.

2. SEO isn’t just about H1 tags and title tags – more importantly, you need traffic. You need to be good enough, you need to be smart enough, and gosh darnit , people need to like you. Well, your site at least. In that respect, your client needs to see you as not just an SEO, but a strategist of sorts, and you absolutely HAVE to be a part of site building from the beginning concept stages.

3. You can listen to what everyone else preaches about what works for SEO or you can find out for yourself. Most SEO “facts” are just things they hear from other SEO’s which they heard from other SEO’s which they read in some article that who knows who wrote it, etc. Where are the cold hard facts? They’re in your data, people! Set up a tight analytics structure and go in and do things to your site and test the results for yourself. You’ll be the smartest (and richest) SEO on the block.

I think Yahoo is going to love working with such a smart person.

Of course, Lee Odden asked her if she got to know Yahoo! “secret sauce”, but she promised she doesn’t get any knowldedge from the Yahoo search team (yet?) but she said she has to “get them drunk and hope to get secrets out of them just like everyone else. ” 🙂

A helpful Yahoo! feature for keyword research

I’ve never really paid attention to the “also try” feature in Yahoo!, which allows you to see related keyword. Each time you run a search in Yahoo!, they display a short list of related keywords, that you can expand by clicking on “more”, then “show all” to see the complete list of related keywords.
I wish I used this feature before, because I have to say that it’s pretty useful if you’re running a keyword research. It can help you find related keywords that you may not have found with other keyword tools.

Apparently, they only display keywords that are popular enough, you can use Overture to verify the popularity of each keyword. One other good thing is that it makes the difference between plurals and singulars.

See the example below for the term “internal audit“:

Yahoo! Answers: real knowledge, entertainment or misleading information?

I was aware of Google Answers where people can go and post any question they want and get an answer for a fee (from $2.00 to $200.00). Their answers are usually pretty smart, being given by people who are usually specialist or well aware of the field the person is asking a question about. Plus if the answer doesn’t satisfy you, the person who replies doesn’t get paid, so he or she’s better off providing a good answer.

Today I heard that Yahoo! provides something similar, called Yahoo! Answers but the system is currently free. That’s probably the reason why there’s a lot of poor quality posts, and it seems that many people go there just for fun, or to make a mock of other people.

I’ve read a few posts and I don’t think it’s the best place to get an answer to your question if it’s something very important to you. I’m not saying that you cannot find good information, I’ve found a very good anwser about SEO but many people seem to post just for fun or to get more points.

Yahoo! Mindset could make life harder for SEO

The guys at Yahoo! Research have been working really hard. Yahoo! Mindset is a great example of their efforts. This search engine, currently still in Demo version, is able to determine if a page has for primary goal to sell something (commercial) or if the goal is to present information only (informational).

They’re using machine learning technology to score web results, from -2: for a page that is most commercial, to +2: for a page that is most informational.

For example, if you do a search for “dell laptop”, by default, you will see dell.com as number 1 result. However, if you scroll the slider to the very right that is “researching”, you’ll get a page about Linux on Dell, a page that’s indeed 100% informational.

If you set the slider to the very left: “shopping” , the first page is commercial only…but it’s not about “dell laptop”, it’s a page about “dell laptop memory cards”.

Well, it’s still in beta version, so we cannot blame them for now. But the technology is actually very interesting.

For SEOs, if search engines are going to use that kind of technique – at least Yahoo! – that would mean that if we want to attract all kind of people to a site, we have to build pages that are informational only, in addition of commercial pages. Plus, if the user can change how the results should appear, that would mean that we won’t be able to tell for sure what our rankings are.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this project goes.