So, Yahoo! just went through with what looks like an update. I am seeing link counts down across the board. For example, two days ago my main site, www.webmarketingnow.com had just over 30,000 links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Today? 25,000. That’s a drop of 1/6th, which is pretty significant. My affiliate sites have seen about the same.

What about traffic?

Good question. Just 6.22% of my traffic comes from Yahoo! (organic). Compare that with 5.05% for MSN (organic) and Google’s lion share of 54.4%. The remaining 35% is PPC, direct or referral traffic. By the way, that’s a pretty healthy ratio 65/35. You don’t want one area to be too dominant (more than 75%) of your referral traffic. And you also don’t want to count on pure PPC for all your traffic either.

Back to Yahoo! … what other changes have taken place? Over at Webmaster World they are discussing canonical issues, which are present mainly because their bot, Inktomi, continues to be ignored and it really needs an update … or just kill it altogether an go to a PPC dominated page with directory results as the organic listing. What Yahoo! is doing with organic search right now just isn’t working. When it was working correctly, they were either using Google to feed their results or using their directory listings.

This isn’t rocket science. Spammers aren’t going to pay $299.00 a year to be listed – real businesses will.

Have you been getting emails like this one below that we have received all week?

This is a courtesy notice to inform you that the minimum bid requirement on one or more of the keywords in your account ‘COMPANY NAME’ [XXXXXXXXXXX] has recently decreased. This means that your ad(s) associated with these keywords are now eligible to be displayed in search results.

The one consistent factor of all the emails we have received, is they are for accounts which have been basically “inactive” or “low volume.” It seems Yahoo! is taking the approach of getting accounts to spend again to lower the bids. I haven’t seen any lower bids on our active accounts, so it seems like this may just be a cheap marketing ploy … and my question is, will the bids go back up once a certain time frame hits?

Are we looking at a “sub-prime” issue in the PPC space? I doubt it, as Yahoo! just doesn’t have the push needed to make a strong case in the space. Even in strong female markets where Yahoo! has been so strong in past years, the conversions just aren’t there.

How is your Yahoo! PPC account? Seeing the same issues?

On another note, what about the new tools Yahoo! introduced a couple of days ago?

Here is what they are offering:

• Search Retargeting: gives advertisers the ability to target display advertising based on user search activities
• Enhanced Retargeting: allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo! network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site
• Enhanced Targeting: capabilities for search advertising, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search.

Due to sheer volume of traffic, I haven’t used these new tools yet so I can’t comment, but I have heard good things about them and the overall feedback has been positive.

Not only does Yahoo! owe me close to $10k in unpaid affiliate commissions, but now they are raising their minimum credit card charge for Yahoo! Search Marketing (PPC) to $250.00. While Yahoo! claims this “in line with the industry’s competitive norm” I don’t see Google or Microsoft doing the same thing.

And then they issued this statement:

From November 3, 2008, until December 31, 2008, Yahoo! will be making a seasonal rate adjustment by increasing the cost per click (CPC) by 25% in all categories. This means that during this period your actual billed CPC will be 25% higher. This adjustment reflects the increased consumer buying activity during the holiday shopping season, which is typified by increased leads, better conversion to sale, and increased revenue for our merchant partners. The 25% adjustment to your billed CPC will be reflected on your Click Report and in your invoice.

I even received an email telling me my phone support has been discontinued. Someone please explain to me why we continue to advertise with Yahoo!? It is getting harder and harder for me to answer that question.

A couple of days ago Yahoo! updated their link counts in their very cool Site Explorer tool. A lot of webmasters were reporting HUGE drops in their link numbers, so I ran reports on all of my domains. The results?

An average drop of 18% in the reported number of links. My main site, Web Marketing Now, saw a drop of 4,000 links (from 25,000 to 21,000).

Yahoo! just did an algorithm update, and while this probably has nothing to do with that update, I have looked at what the changes could be and I’m not seeing any consistency in the types of links which were dropped. There is speculation that Yahoo! is no longer counting certain types of links and removed “nofollow” type of links, but that is just pure speculation at this point.

The bottom line is, there was an adjustment, and Yahoo! doesn’t have enough market share organically to really cause too much stress over this.

Yahoo! looks to keep following in Google’s footsteps as they are now showing “Googlish” Sitemaps. Here is a screenshot of a search for “microsoft”.

Many main keyword phrases don’t have them, but “software” and “travel” do. For my affiliate sites which have Sitelinks in Google, they do not have Sitelinks in Yahoo! – at least not yet.

This is getting, well, pathetic. First Yahoo! doesn’t update the data for about 14 months and then they take the tool offline. Then Microsoft comes knocking and they want to buy the search component of Yahoo! suddenly the tool works again. Similarly to that leaky sink you’ve had for years in your house, and you finally fix it because you’ve put the house on the market.

And now?

When you attempt to access the tool you are redirected to Yahoo!’s Small Business page and you’re pitched to sign up for their PPC service. This really sucks as I’ve developed some really cool research tools which pull from this data.