Yahoo Looking For Relevancy
Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Yahoo is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Department of Justice on their proposed search advertising deal with Google, but that has not stopped them from making adjustments to their own advertising platform. In fact, some think they might even be doing it to emphasize to critics of the deal, that they are still serious about their own advertising endeavors, and are not just bowing down to the forces of Google.

Yahoo's been trying a variety of things to increase the relevancy of both their search results and their ads. They're out to prove that they're still quite independent from Google despite their controversial advertising deal with the company.

Google itself has emphasized time and time again that this deal is good for competition, and will not hamper Yahoo's advertising offering. Yahoo has been relatively quiet on the issue in comparison, leaving most of the defensive tactics up to Google. Google has put up a website dedicated to the "facts" about the deal, and their lawyers are even calling advertisers asking for testimonials for the deal.

Yahoo Search Marketing has implemented a new system for geo-targeting so users can better pinpoint their target markets. Users can now select targets as wide as an entire country, and as narrow as a single zip code. Yahoo's geo-targeting offering trumps Google's who only offers it down to the city level:

In a statement that seemed crafted to address the DOJ's concerns, Yahoo said the new features are "reinforcing its commitment to be a leader in search." Yahoo undertook its enhancements to appease U.S. investigators. However, the move may serve to kill two birds with one stone convincing both advertisers and investigators that it still means to provide a serious alternative to Google.

Further evidence to support this notion is the incorporation of Search Monkey applications into general Yahoo search results. This seems to be nothing more than an attempt to boost relevancy in the way Google tries to do with their own applications showing up in results. Yahoo's latest attempt at social media seems to indicate an additional component of a strategy to bolster use. This attempt has been the object of criticism, but you might say the social aspect could lead to increased relevancy as a whole too. User engagement can potentially lead to the sharing of relevant information between friends.

The search game has long been a quest for relevancy, and Yahoo is banking on opening up their services in more ways than one to achieve this. However, no matter how much they improve relevancy, they still have to overcome Google - the brand. Yahoo has a brand too.
Not all marketing campaigns will call for the relevancy delivered from a geo-targeted campaign. After all, some products are potentially relevant to people everywhere. That said, geo-targeting can be an incredibly useful weapon in an Internet marketer's arsenal, and the more precision offered from any provider of geo-targeting services, the better chance that marketer will have of achieving success with that campaign. Unfortunately for users of Yahoo Search Marketing, Google still dominates the search market share by a wide margin, and to the best of my knowledge, the Google deal doesn't include serving Yahoo ads on Google's search engine.

Yahoo Looking For Relevancy
Monday, October 13, 2008

Ever since Google released the crawl errors feature in Webmaster Tools, webmasters have asked for the sources of the URLs causing the errors. We know it was difficult for those of you who wanted to identify the cause of a particular "Not found" error, in order to prevent it in the future or even to request a correction, without knowing the source URL. Now, Crawl error sources makes the process of tracking down the causes of "Not found" errors a piece of cake. This helps you improve the user experience on your site and gives you a jump start for links. In our "Not Found" and "Errors for URLs in Sitemaps" reports, we've added the "Linked From" column. For every error in these reports, the "Linked From" column now lists the number of pages that link to a specific "Not found" URL.
America Online has announced it will expand its relationship with Google and will use the search leader's technology as the foundation for enhancements to its own search offering. Under the agreement, AOL Search will feature both search results from Google's algorithmic engine and sponsored links from Google's booming paid-listing service. Google will continue to provide sponsored links in AOL's business listings and Yellow Pages directories as well.
AOL said its new version 9.0 will feature other search upgrades as well, including: more localized results; content delivered automatically based on ZIP codes already provided to AOL by customers; and a hot-topics feature that will tell AOL users what topics fellow members are searching for most often. Google gaining access to AOL's membership could be a huge step forward for Google as it strives to gain the upper hand in what is likely to be a protracted battle for local search revenue.

The major players have identified this opportunity and are taking steps toward claiming their share.. Even though AOL's membership rolls are in flux, the company still possesses massive reach in the United States and overseas. Even given AOL's troubles, that's still very valuable real estate for a search player.

Making Waves
The AOL-Google partnership announcement comes amid signs that further changes in the search landscape are imminent. For example, LookSmart has said it could lose up to 70 percent of its total revenue stream in the wake of Microsoft's decision not to use it on its MSN search page, sparking speculation that LookSmart will be acquired by a larger player.
Also, in recent weeks, Amazon.com has made public a previously low-key attempt to devise its own search tools specifically tailored to e-commerce -- tools it plans to use on its own site and license to other e-trailers. And Yahoo has unveiled what it believes is a breakthrough in shopping search that combines the two types of search technology with browsing and comparison-shopping features.

Click Fraud Revisited
As announced Google has released keyword tracking for advertisers. This is an extremely helpful tool for those looking for a firm grasp on what words are producing and which are duds.
The way the service works is you place a snippet of code on your sales/sign-up/thank you page which Google uses to report back to your Adwords stats. MVI has long offered this type of service in the product call MVI conversions.