Online Marketing Blog

Via TW, Fortune reports that Yahoo may be resuming talks with AOL about an acquisition as a play against rival Google.

“FORTUNE has learned from multiple sources that Yahoo! recently approached Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE’s publisher) about buying America Online – essentially trying to jump-start talks that broke down a year ago. A source close to Yahoo disputes that Yahoo approached Time Warner and says that there are no active conversations between the two companies.”

The story also offers speculation about what Yahoo’s next moves might be:

• Sell to Microsoft
• Merge with eBay
• Stay the course

Yahoo has launched a snappy new blog today for Yahoo Search Marketing. Call me crazy, but purple is my favorite color after all and the look/feel of this blog is consistent with many of the newer and more progressive blog designs coming out.

With the launch of Yahoo’s new platform (Panama) it makes sense to offer a communication channel specific to Yahoo advertising options. I am very interested in the media side of this:

“We‚Äôll examine how 21st Century media such as Tivo, satellite radio and the Internet are contributing to the challenges faced by traditional marketing channels like TV, radio and newspapers. Audiences are fragmenting, and advertisers both large and small are looking for understanding and insight into alternate solutions that will provide the connections they need to their target markets.”

“Why should I use del.icio.us?” is a question I got the other day. It seems that del.icio.us provides no search engine love as it blocks the bookmarks with nofollow tags, yet it is very valuable.

What del.icio.us is good for is exposure. Lots of people use del.icio.us to not only store their own bookmarks but find new and interesting websites. I know that sites like LifeHacker sometimes posts on what is popular in del.icio.us too. This then turns in to a very valuable link back to your site.

What you are really doing is trying to create buzz and visibility for an article or a site that you think is interesting. It’s not about spamming link building for search engines.

When I attend or speak at conferences, I always, like to visit the exhibit areas to see how they’re laid out, scope out which search marketing agencies are exhibiting and to visit friends from other companies and search engines. While checking out the Interactive exhibit hall here at DMA06, I noticed a few things:

There were hardly any search marketing agencies. Kevin Lee was there with Did-It and I believe I saw iCrossing. That was it. Apparently SEOInc had a booth in the other monstrous Exhibit hall that was made up of list brokers, direct mail companies,etc.

The major search engines were there (except Ask.com and AOL) as was True Local.

Google

Yahoo

I guess it’s the night for emails from the search engines. Yahoo sent out an email to Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers with a notice that Yahoo is now allowing them to request an invitation to upgrade. That’s an interesting spin isn’t it? Have your advertisers ask to upgrade? What it really means is a phased approach at rolling out the new program:

“Invitations will be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. You’ll be notified of your upgrade date at least two weeks in advance. You’ll also be able to access a preview of what your account will look like after the upgrade.”

Some of the new features include:

• Fast ad activation (no more 3-5 days)

Yahoo gives a new weather report that they rolled out a search index update but not any more detail than that.

There’s a particular phrase that’s very competitive on Yahoo that I spot check every time an update is announced (286,000,000 search results) and we have 2 of our sites in the top ten for the phrase. With this most recent Yahoo update, we dropped from #1 to #3 and the second listing moved up to #5 which is fine, but Yahoo is completely ignoring our 301 redirects and showing the wrong domain names.

Matt Cutts from Google gave his own weather report as well talking about better handling of supplemental results, related sites, a pagerank export and the insight that there probably won’t be too many huge changes with webspam ranking, but in true Matt-style, he leaves the door open a bit.

Matt asks for your favorite Web 2.0 companies. Here’s a huge list from Seth Godin and another from SEOMoz.

Blogs have gone missing from Yahoo News reports TW. Steve Rubel notices too and suggests that Yahoo is building a dedicated blog and feed search tool. Maybe something like: reader.yrank.feeds.yahoo.com.
Update: Greg Jarboe offers some interesting insight suggesting that perhaps Yahoo is not permanently taking blogs out of news search results.

Are you into marketing via Wikipedia? Then you’ll be interested in the most popular Wikipedia pages. via Google Blogscoped.

Yahoo issues another Weather Report.

Google is updating backlinks reports Barry.

Cool Web 2.0 sort of shopping recommendation, tagging, and more site. ThisNext.com. Hat tip to Eric.

Fortune Magazine posted an interview with Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel today with questions about Yahoo’s mater plan, and Yahoo vs Google: “…just being really good at one thing may not be enough.”

It’s tempting for mainstream media to compare Yahoo and Google but I don’t think most people do. At least not head to head. When I want to search, I do think of Google first. But when I want to use maps, or web based email, or instant messaging I use Yahoo. I also use Flickr a lot, but I don’t necessarily associate it with the Yahoo brand. Yahoo is getting some traction with Answers, but it’s delay with Panama isn’t doing the stock any favors.
Full article.

Yahoo has updated their Site Explorer tool to offer some very Google Sitemap-like tools including the ability to track more than one site, display the last crawl date, easier feed submission and an update notification service. These services require a Yahoo account to login.

Some interesting info from Yahoo recently including an updated “Weather Report” announcing that a new and improved (Slurp) is in action. So now Yahoo has a new look and feel and a new and improved spider. I don’t use Yahoo much more than I used to, maybe a little more. Old habits are hard to break. I was checking my Yahoo account and see that I’m coming up on my 10 year anniversary. Long live Yahoo.
Yahoo Search Blog posted about a modification of the very useful Yahoo Site Explorer tool that Yahoo Korea put out called Webzari, a visual representation of your link neighborhood. It’s only in Korean now, but hopefully Yahoo will publish versions in other languages or at least English.¬† Here’s the Online Marketing Blog link universe. (via Barry)
You know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words, right? Personally, I like graphic representations like Webzari. Some other cool visual search tools you might like include: The Google related tool over at Touchgraph, that slick new tool at Digg labs called Swarm or trusty visual search engine Kartoo.

I’ve just added Feedblitz’ subscribe via email as an option on this blog. (under categories on the right)

If you think about it, subscribe via email is something every blog should have as not everyone knows what a feed is or how it all works. For every one person that knows about feeds, there are probably 10 that have no idea. However, almost everyone knows what emails is. So having a subscribe via email is an option all blogs should have.

There are quite a few services out there and one seems to be just as good as the other. I like Feedblitz as it allows me to see who’s subscribed to my blog and I can export the emails too. For an additional cost, I can also design the email templates. Other feed to email services include R|Mail, RSSFwd & Yahoo Alerts.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo

We’ve been on a bit of a “Spotlight on Search Interview” hiatus the past few weeks, but I can assure you this one is worth the wait. Today we have a very nice interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first became aware of Laura’s SEO wisdom via her animated stick figure avatar in Jill Whalen’s High Rankings SEO forum. Dispensing excellent advice to newbies and old timers alike, Laura has gone from circus performer extraordinaire to Flash-superstar-wannabe to a dream gig as an in-house SEO for Yahoo. I want to say thank you to the exceptionally thorough legal and marketing folks at Yahoo for letting Laura do this interview. Now on to the good stuff.