Online Marketing Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Aaron Wall has posted an excellent article on search engine relevancy over at SEOBook.com explaining his perception of the different relevancy criteria used by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Aaron offers both a short version and long version. Yahoo is great, but can still be manipulated. Google is best at determining relevancy. MSN is still new and currently easiest to manipulate. Ask is good, but their small market share does not necessarily warrant specific attention from a SEO perspective.

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Yahoo SearchBlog has announced the update of the Yahoo MyWeb service. The MyWeb blog also offers feature details including:

• Top Tags and Interesting Today
• Finding Friends
• Searching
• Export

Yahoo continues to push further into the realm of “social search” and the implications for search marketing is significant.¬† The editorial relevancy that comes with the links as well as tags from the web at large promises to make searching a much different experience than it is now. Hopefully quality is one of those characteristics. But how will search marketers change what they do to help clients take advantage of the changing nature of search relevancy?

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New Yorker writer Ken Auletta interviewed Terry Semel, the chairman and C.E.O. of Yahoo! today, at a breakfast sponsored by the Newhouse School and The New Yorker. Semel covers everything from how Yahoo got into search to what’s in store for the future of search.

More coverage on this over at mediabistro, BuzzMachine and of course, Barry.

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Yahoo advertisers received an email recently announcing up and coming enhancements including instant ads & geotargeting to the program. I know a lot of complaints I hear from clients about Yahoo Search Marketing/Oveture has to do with the length of time it takes for the editorial process. This is a step in the right direction. The addition of geotargeting will also be a nice addition and help local search advertisers.

It looks like even more changes are in store:

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Yahoo threw an invite party at “Saint” in Boston last night and it proved to be a good time. It was a good thing they were letting in “guests” of people on the list or I think there would have been only half as many people there. Good for you Yahoo in doing this as Microsoft has really shot itself in the foot at SES conferences by being uber strict with their “invite only” events.

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