There’s talk over in WMW regarding YSM failing over and over again with importing data, especially from AdWords. I’ve been using YSM back when it was GoTo and the process of importing data has NEVER been easy. Why do you expect any different? It’s difficult in AdWords too. Just my opinion, but I think they do this on purpose. If it is harder to go from service to service, you may not bail. Lame I know, but it is 2007 and if you can’t create a seamless way to import data, I don’t think you’re ever going to offer it.

And that’s a shame.

In a move that was long over due Yahoo! has announced their new Quality Center.

They have an analytics product to compete (cough, cough) against Google Analytics. There is a “Click Protection” to help battle click fraud. The ability to block domains and even block continents will also be available. Like I said, this has been a long time coming from Yahoo! and should have been in place at the latest in 2005 with the technology edge that they had.

My biggest issue with the traffic Yahoo! brings in is that they accept virtually any partner that has money. The quality of their traffic when compared to Google is significantly poor. Yahoo! used to have quality traffic, but they don’t anymore. It is my hope that with the new executive team, they can clean things up, rid themselves of the parasites that they have as traffic partners and get back to what made Yahoo! great.

Scott Hendison had a great blog post that you should check out regarding a new “advertising” method that Yahoo! has announced. Scott even has screen shots of a search to showcase this new layout. I am waiting on a call back from my contact over at Yahoo! for clarification which will probably be “no comment” … or “I wasn’t aware of that, let me get back to you.”

In any event, I have been saying for a long time that Yahoo! has been making decisions and organizational moves that signal the end of organic search. The word I hear is that Inktomi is so dated and they aren’t willing to invest to improve it. It just makes sense as their organic results get single digit click throughs in terms of market share.

They just need to switch to a complete paid model and bring back the directory results as their “organic results”. So, you have PPC ads at the top, local results and then directory results. That model is perfect and makes sense. Why isn’t Yahoo! doing it?

Can this be it? I think so. Terry Semel is out as CEO and Jerry Yang, Yahoo!’s co-founder is back in. This is great news. Semel was behind every stupid move Yahoo! has made, including the investment of a billion dollars into Alibaba. How has that worked out for them. Not too good.

Read up on my post back in January how Yahoo! Screwed Itself largely in part because of Semel. Another good move was naming Susan Decker as president. I have met Susan and she is brilliant. I like this move. I just may buy Yahoo! stock again. Their stock is up 8% which is a nice move for Yahoo!.

From my association with Decker and what I know about Yang, this could be a revolution of sorts and a bringing back of the Yahoo! Directory back into the search results. I hope so, that would be the injection that Yahoo! needs in the search market.

Last month Yahoo! announced support for a “no content” tag so you could tag text that you wanted to display on the page, but not have Yahoo! index. Sounded like a great plan.

The problem is, Slurp indexed content it wasn’t supposed to a less less than a quarter of the sites we placed the code on.

Here is what the code looks like and how it is supposed to behave.

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site

This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page

This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site

This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents

You can use the “class=robots-nocontent” attribute with all XHTML tags and thus have great flexibility on applying this to your site pages.

Since this tag only works with Yahoo! and the typical site only gets about 5% referral traffic from the organic listings of Yahoo! my suggestion is to ignore this until Google picks it up or comes out with something similar. My guess is they will come out with something similar and it will work consistently.

You can read more on the No Content Tag straight from Yahoo.

Need More Qualified Traffic? Get the Yahoo! Assisted Setup Offer!

As a lot of you know, I used to be a pretty heavy affiliate for Yahoo! for a number of years. Then some “Yahoo!” was hired, slashed the commissions and made it unmarketable. Add onto that the constant changeover … I had seven reps in just a few months. It seemed that everytime I came into the office my rep was fired or quit. It was getting beyond hilarious. I remember one rep being assigned to me on a Wednesday and I shared my past experience with him and he said, “Jerry, I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.” Two days later on Friday, “Hello Mr. West, this is your new account rep.”

Nice.

They have made ammends and my rep is the same one since last September. That says something. While Yahoo! has had their struggles over the last year or two, they seem to be putting some effort back into their Search Marketing program. So, I am back promoting it and they have given me an offer they haven’t done for about a year ….

Now, let’s talk marketing for a moment, Yahoo! caters to females, and recent studies have shown that in married households, females have strong input in 85% of buying decisions in the home. Reach them with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Due to my strong relationship with Yahoo!, they are waiving the setup fee of their premium Assisted Setup service (regularly $199.00) through Friday, May 25th (tomorrow). For more information, see our page detailing Yahoo’s excellent offer. As I said, one they have not made in a year.

Get the Assisted Setup Now with No Setup Fee & a $300.00 deposit.

What’s that? You don’t have $300.00? Why are you reading this then? Stop stealing time from your employer and go back to your job.

I guess Yahoo! Search doesn’t think it gets enough abuse and they have begun their “spam” campaign to anyone with an email address to get them suckered into their Search Submit Basic … which they have been running through Position Tech for years. The deal is this: You pay Yahoo! $49.00 per URL for a year and you get to be in their … free index.

Nice.

Your only benefit is that their spider will visit your pages every seven days. Um, doesn’t it already do that? Also, the referral rate from the organic area from Yahoo! search is in the single digits these days – plus we have a very nice “mask” in their ad. Let’s check it out:

Now, in looking at the image above, when in the world has Yahoo! only shown three paid ads for a search for a keyword like “flowers”? Yeah, never. I am surprised they showed three – I would have expected two. Basically, Yahoo! is trying to show you that the organic listings have such a large presence on the page, when reality is, it doesn’t.

See the graphic below for proof:

Look at the graphic above (real live search) and compare it to the first graphic which is what Yahoo! is trying to “sell” you. Notice the real search has four paid listings while the ad shows only three. While it may not seem like much, it makes a world of difference in how it looks. Much the same way the fast food restaurants push all the “toppings” to the front of the burger to make it look “overflowing” this is doing much the same.

I would advise you to avoid this program, as it didn’t work years ago when Yahoo! actually had market share, and there is no indication why it would be different now.

Yahoo! is moving their Inktomi bot from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net. The user-agent will still be Yahoo!Slurp, thus it looks like nothing more than a relocation and unfortunately, there has been no update to the bot itself. The IP address isn’t changing either.

This is disappointing … we’ve been waiting since the takeover by Yahoo! that Slurp would get the update it needs. Instead, it will continue to get caught in “spider traps” that are simplistic. It seems that Yahoo! Search continues to be on the back burner with the Yahoo! execs.

There has been some talk in some forums that the best way to get a top ranking in the Yahoo! Directory is to make your site more popular, and the way to do that is to get people to click on your directory listing.

Um, no.

If that was the case, then there would be a service that would click your directory listing over and over with different IPs to move up your listing. I have tested this, and clicking on your listing does absolutely nothing. More traffic, more page views does.

Yahoo! states that the criteria of ranking in their directory is their Search Technology. Of course, they don’t state exactly what the criteria is … but it seems that there is a link up with Alexa ranking and the number of unique click throughs to your site from the Yahoo! network.

I have tried to manipulate the listings and could never crack the top ten. Manipulation seems to be a waste of time – especially with the low number of referrals from the Yahoo! Directory.

Much has been said in the forums and such regarding the new Yahoo! Quality Score. Want to increase your Quality Score, outrank your competitors and pay less? That’s easy, follow this advice from Yahoo!Sarah:

Remember that more than click-through rate influences the quality of an ad. The quality of an ad is determined relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Expected performance and historical performance is analyzed but she didn’t say how “expected performance” was measured. Historical performance data was not purged on February 5, but as time passes, the data generated after the launch of the new ranking model will have the strongest influence on ad quality calculations.

The time it takes to take both expected and historical performance into account to measure ad quality depends on the volume of searches related to a keyword. Keywords with lots of daily searches often generate enough data in a relatively short period of time until historical performance is a stronger factor for ad quality within that marketplace.

And no, the data used to determine ad quality is not “purged” at the beginning of a new month. Again, no information was given as to how long the historical data is kept. Essentially, what this means for you is nothing. Yahoo! seems to be giving information, when in reality they are not. Stating that they are going by historical data, but not giving ranges of when the historical data is purged is useless to a business owner.

Here’s some more info on Yahoo Search Marketing’s Quality Ranking Score:

Yahoo Search Marketing’s ‘Quality Index Ranking’ may look at these factors as being the most important (note the all important word “may” in the text):

* Bid or Click Price
* Historical click-through data
* Conversion data
* Organic Rankings of the said Advertiser URL (will a high organic ranking give an increase or decrease?)
* Whether the query word/phrase appears in the title
* Keyword in URL
* Keywords on Landing Page
* Possibly other Keyphrases in Campaign
* Comparison between other sites advertising for keyterm

Here are some methods which could better your ranking within Yahoo Search Marketing Sponsored Listings:

1. Call to Action in Active Ad Copy
2. Compelling Title Tag
3. Geotargeted Advertising
4. Use of Searched Keyword in Ad Copy
5. Use of A/B Split Ad Copy Testing to See Which Works Better
6. Try Dayparting : Running More or Less Ads During Certain Part of the Day
7. Test Landing Pages : Run With the Higher Converting Ones
8. Inclusion of Text Based Keyphrases on Landing Page
9. Use Keywords in Landing Page URL
10. Use of a recognizeable domain

Once again Yahoo! disappoints in giving their customers information that is helful and useful. We are just left with generalities and really no new concrete information than we had before this was released.