So let me get this straight. Yahoo! turned down a ton of money from Microsoft and then the next deal they do is one with a company who’s reputation is they kill everything they touch – McAfee. Don’t get me started with how much their “anti-virus” software sucks. But just look what they have done to HackerSafe. I have taken HackerSafe off ALL of my sites. Not only are there so many false positives which makes trying to do business online a headache, but no one knows how to do their job. No one has an answer when you call and it’s the same old song and dance: “We’ll call you back.”

But no one calls.

People in the media are hailing this as a great deal as it will allow for web surfers to be more secure as SearchScan will protect users from malicious sites. Um, wrong. Has no one testing this piece of garbage? I mean seriously. Do you realize that the system is in place to block sites based upon employee opinion? And when that employee’s opinion is biased due to an alliance with another company, well, it no longer becomes a benefit for the surfer, it becomes a political playing field controlled by whoever is feeding the editor of that section?

Yahoo! clearly is sinking fast.

The minimum bids went live with YSM (Yahoo! Search Marketing, Overture, GoTo.com) and I’ve been messing with a bunch of landing pages trying my best to get the minimum bids to be Googlish $10.00 but so far, I’m swinging and missing.

I’ve called quite a few heavy hitters in the Yahoo! space and no one has seen high minimum bids yet. My gut tells me it will be just a matter of time … or maybe Yahoo! is concerned with no one using them and will take anyone as long as their credit card is good.

Could Yahoo! be the MLM of Search? You know, that one neighbor down the street who is building his pyramid scheme with anyone with a pulse and enough on their credit card to buy the “intro pack”. I swear, if one more neighbor of mine says, “Hey Jerry, I have a presentation I have to give at work tomorrow, could you come over and watch me and tell me if it is any good?”

… end slightly off-topic rant …

Wait, let me inject some advice if you are a consultant. Learn how to say “No” to the wrong client and be picky. You will be happier, you’ll make more and you won’t have to check into the nut house after a bad client again skipped out on their bill. Hold out for the good ones, and once you get busy, be like Keith Jennison and simply raise your rates.

I have greatly scaled back my use of YSM (Yahoo! Search Marketing) mainly due to the poor conversion numbers in comparison with AdWords. But one of my biggest issues over the years is being passionately discussed over at Webmaster World.

The issue?

If you want to leave YSM how difficult is it to take your data? Or, if you control multiple accounts, can you manage them effectively while giving only certain clients access to their data? The answer has been “no” for years and remains so. Why? Who knows. All I can say is I grow tired of hearing “it is in development and should be available in an upcoming update” from my account rep.

Dan Boberg, who is one of the leading people at YSM, and who I first signed a contract with back in 1999 when he was with GoTo.com, is not only bright but does what he can to ensure customer needs are met. He and I have discussed this issue for what seems like years now, but nothing is done due to resistance from above.

Look, Yahoo! needs to understand that your typical super affiliate or heavy PPC user doesn’t use just one network but several. And if I can set up a Yahoo account and then take the data to setup other accounts with AdWords and adCenter, then that makes me happy. However, handcuffing me to your system makes Panama more of a joke than it is.

You guys had, what, four years to rewrite the engine and this is what you came up with? Give me flexibility in taking MY data elsewhere – after all, it is my data. And if I manage 20 accounts, and a client wants to see the account, don’t give him access to my other 19 because they are all on a master account. Just allow them access to their domain only. I cannot tell you how often privacy has been breached over the years because of this. Google does it and it isn’t that hard.

You bought Overture five years ago. What’s been going on over the last five years? From the looks of Panama, not much. I’m going back into my AdWords account …

If you are one of the few webmasters who still has a Yahoo! Directory listing for $299.00 a year, you may have noticed your listing looks a little “off” as mine does below:

The solution? It’s easy. Just look in your code of your home page and you’ll see this line:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir">

Just remove it. What this line is for is to not allow Yahoo to use it’s Directory Title and Description in the SERPs. Unfortunately, what it chooses is well, awful. In about 2-4 days after removing it, your listing will return to “normal” as shown below:

As you can see the Title is back to normal (no longer just the domain name) and the Description is included, as it wasn’t earlier.