search marketing blog: ambergreen

Yahoo! is taking the last step with its new Panama ad system today and releasing the new ‘Marketplace Design’ algorithm in the US, the biggest threat to Google’s stranglehold on advertising dollars ever seen.

While parts of Panama have gone live over the past few weeks, the new ranking algorithm will see the system move from a bid price ranking model to a system which takes bid, ad quality and other factors into account when determining where ads are ranked on results pages.

The new system is meant to give users more relevant ad results which sounds good.  However, the other reason behind the Panama project has been to increase monetization, which won’t sound so good to advertisers.  There are fears that while the new algorithm will increase ad quality, it will also force advertisers to overpay.

Advertisers aren’t used to a system which doesn’t rely on bid price only, so it won’t be a surprise if this stirs up some complaints.  In fact, in a New York Times article today Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel isn’t resting on his laurels, saying: “It has been and continues to be our No. 1 company priority.”

Although Panama is US only at present, roll out to the UK is expected in the next few months, giving us time to sit back, watch the fall out and prepare the best we can in the meantime.

Search Engine Land’s Mona Elesseily has given us a great review of the technical aspects of the new algorithm including how historical clickthrough rates (CTRs), Expected CTRs, ad copy, bids, URLs and advertiser information are some of the major relevance factors considered in the new algorithm.

Yahoo! has launched a new tool which allows webmaster to very quickly remove a URL from the index if necessary.  The Delete URL option, which is accessed via Yahoo! Explorer, not only deals with the removal of one URL, but also clears all associated subpaths.

Search Engine Land was lucky enough to spend some time with some of the Site Explorer team - Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar and Tim Mayer – who went over the Delete URL option and explained the differences between what the Delete URL function does in contrast to the usual robots.txt file and meta robots tag methods of keeping a page out of the index.

Danny Sullivan has posted an in depth explanation of how Delete URL works independently of the other two options; pages will continue to be crawled but similar to won’t get indexed.

Yahoo! has updated its Site Explorer tool, the application that allows you to explore all the links and web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search.

The update allows users to authenticate using meta tags and offers new Site Explorer badges which can be added to your site to show how many sites link to yours as far as Yahoo! is concerned.

Yahoo’s ‘Brand Universe’ brand centric websites which were announced in November 2006 have started to go live, with sites such as Nintendo Wii which contain no original content but host scraped content from other sites.

Revolving around one brand alone, ‘Brand Universe’ sites take content from social media site such as Flickr, Yahoo! Answers and other Yahoo! owned sites to deliver a brand focused way to connect user interests across their properties.

By the end of 2007 Brand Universe is set to have 100 brand sites up and running, including sites for popular TV programmes, films, bands etc – some of the sites due to launch next include Sims, The Office and Harry Potter.

Yahoo! began rolling out some changes on Friday, so some ranking shuffling should be expected.

SearchEngineLand discusses a recent patent application from Yahoo! which gives some allusions as to the work Yahoo! is doing to user created information into the way in which they index, organise and rank information.

Yahoo!’s increasing moves into social search with the acquisition of MyBlogLog, Flickr etc indicate just how much Yahoo! is willing to stake in this area, and this patent seems to highlight further moves to enable the company to “exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities, in particular, search,” as Raghu Ramakrishnan, Vice President and Research Fellow of Yahoo!, has previously said.

This article discusses several papers which indicate how Yahoo! intends to accomplish greater management of the interactions between Yahoo and users of Yahoo services.

Following weeks of speculation Yahoo! has finally announced that it has agreed to buy MyBlogLog.

The two year old service allows users to create a profile, upload a picture and add your usernames from various other sites – in essence using MyBlogLog enables you to carry your profile around the web, building a social network as you go.  The MyBlogLog communities service makes it easy for you to create an online community, and join the “community” of any other registered site.

According to the site, “MyBlogLog enables you to take advantage of your existing presence on the Web and ties it into communities of like-minded readers and authors to add context to the conversations in which you take part.”  Anyone that reads a site or blog can learn about and engage with someone else, and become friends with other people who read their favorite blogs, learning more about people along the way.

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, told Forbes.com “MyBlogLog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

“This closes the loop between readers and publishers,” he said. “Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It’s the power of implicit networking.”

MyBlogLog currently has a reach of approximately 45,000 blogs, but sign up activity has picked up considerably in recent weeks.  Horowitz admitted that he has, “..gigantic plans for this project. This is a playground where readers can talk to each other…think about community photos, community answers, Yahoo groups or meeting services.”

Search Engine Land has a great review of the service, showing how it allows you to easily let anyone join and see your “blog community.

Yahoo! continues to concentrate on social media and community initiatives, and given it’s recent success with social media sites such a Flickr and del.icio.us.  

As a group, it is clear to see the value in these web communities as they offer Yahoo! a deeper understanding of online social communities and user activity that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of search and make future social media developments clearer.

Yahoo! and 3G mobile network 3 have furthered their partnership with a deal to provide new mobile internet services for customers.

Yahoo! Go will initially allow users in Italy, UK, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark, to search via their handheld device, with other European countries set to follow. Expansion into Asia by the two companies is also expected.

The Yahoo! Go service allows mobile users to personalise their internet application, and allows access to the entire internet, not just Yahoo! services.

The 3 arrangement is one of several Yahoo! deals announced at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. The search giant has extended deals with Motorola, Samsung and Nokia in a move clearly designed to support Yahoo!’s recent heavy focus on the mobile market.

Yahoo! is celebrating the first birthday of its social Q&A site only weeks after Google put their similar product into retirement.

With 16.6 million users gathered in the past year, Yahoo! Answers might just be one of Yahoo!’s most successful products ever. To celebrate Yahoo! commissioned a survey with Harris Interactive which found that one in three adults have used a Q&A site, with half of these (52%) saying that the answers they received helped them make a decision – and with top quality questions such as Can muhammad ali kelle fight a tiger and kill it?i mean if a tiger gets a punch of his on it face will it die? – that’s both astounding and a little worrying…

In its first year, Yahoo! Answers has seen 60 million answers from its active community, which is unsurprising given that 77% of adults questioned said that they were more likely to turn to the internet if they needed an answer to something their friends and family weren’t familiar with – or more likely that they might freak them out given some of the crazy questions on there. You’ve gotta be concerned.

According to Hitwise data, last week Yahoo! Answers ranked 240 among all categories of websites and 22 in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category, based on share of UK internet visits. The market share of UK based visits has grown 9% in the past month, 39% in the past eight weeks and more than 30 fold in the past six months. Pretty impressive.

I love Yahoo! Answers – its supremely entertaining and it really does have a great community feel, as different to Google’s attempt as you could get. Just try not to lie awake at night worrying about how the lives of some of the people are going to turn out….

A new McAfee survey has found that AOL has the most trustworthy search results, not listing sites that might be unsafe for searchers. Testing 2,500 results McAfee found that only 3.6% of those sites returned in the top 5 pages for the queries were unsafe or risky.

These figures show that the engines seem to be winning the war against unsafe spammy sites, with the vast majority of results being safe. The red results above are dangerous sites (i.e. giving out adware, sending spam if you give an email address) and yellow sites, which are classified as those which deserve caution (tries to change browser settings, pop-up ads).

Interestingly it was the paid results that were found to be the most risky across all search engines, as seen below.

This survey was first carried out in May, with the update information being added two days ago. Changes over the past 6 months show that since the release of the first study in May 2006, the percentage of red and yellow sites in search results decreased from 5.0% to 4. 4%. But while Google, AOL, and Ask now return safer results than they did in May, while Yahoo! and MSN return riskier results.