Do you love these awesome titles lately as much as I do? Yeah, probably not.

My new copy of Wired Magazine just arrived in the mail. I love Wired. If you don’t get it – it is just $10.00 a year online. They have an article on the demise of Yahoo!. There is some good info in there, but they also missed a ton of stuff. So, I thought it would be a good SEO History lesson to review what has gone on so we can predict what may happen in the near future…

I have been getting nailed with emails from my contacts over the last week regarding the launch on February 5th of their new system that they are really excited about.

Yahoo! will launch its new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. on Monday, February 5. With the new ranking model, all Yahoo! search marketing ads in the U.S. will be ranked by quality in addition to keyword bid price. As a result, Yahoo! will be able to provide a more relevant search experience to users, more valuable customer leads to advertisers, and additional opportunities to its distribution partners.

As a software tester, I would get frustrated with the developers when I would show them an obvious bug in the product and they would respond, “Oh, well that is an undocumented feature.” In other words, they screwed up, they know it, but they don’t feel like fixing it.

Lately, I have felt that Yahoo! Search is full of “undocumented features” especially in the Titles that are displayed.

Down at Webmaster World in Vegas this past November a good webmaster was labeled a “spammer” and a “cloaker” by the site review panel when it was a bug in the Yahoo! SERPs.

Earlier this month Yahoo! had an update to their index around December 10th. Over the last few weeks we have detected plenty of fluxuations, but things seem to have settled down. Our members of the SEO Revolution will be getting the latest algorithm update and will know exactly what was changed and what to do.

For some reason, there is still talk about paid inclusion from Yahoo! and their bot Inktomi. I have used paid inclusion for many years – and each time I have used it I have been less than impressed.

Basically, it allows you to get all of your URLs fed into the index and you pay either 15 cents or thirty cents per click. You can also cut a deal for ten cents a click, but only if your site has a ton of quality content, thus, you can qualify for their “library rate”.

I just got this email … if you haven’t gotten yours yet, it is certainly on its way. Another showcase of the massive cutbacks Yahoo! is going through.

Dear Advertiser,

As you will soon notice when you log into your Sponsored Search account, we are making some important changes to your Manage Bids page.

In early December 2006, some of the information on the Manage Bids page will no longer be available. We will be removing the “Top 5 Max Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns from the current account interface. The View Bids tool will also be removed.

Yahoo! continues to make tweaks to their algorithm/filters … and making mistakes in the meantime. The major issues have been resolved and it looks like things are back in line.

I guess Yahoo! is sick of seeing all of the ads for Ask.com lately, so they are going on the blitz themselves. Let’s hope they remember the laws of marketing and violate them. Many big companies do – just because they are so big and they think the rules don’t apply to them.

Learn from past companies like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Just because you are “top dog” doesn’t mean you will stay there. Yahoo! Search is not doing well. Their “market share” in terms of number of searches are consistent, but the click throughs are way, way down in comparison with rivals MSN and Google. In fact, MSN outpaces Yahoo! by 4-1 in terms of number of click throughs realized in search.

In the forums there is some guy who is claiming he can get a site in the Yahoo! directory for just $60.00 instead of the $299.00 annual fee. I see these types of schemes all the time – and that is exactly what they are – a scheme. The tragic part about it, is people are spending time and energy to see if this is legit.

“Sorry, that bottle of elixir won’t cure your ills just like the last five dozen you bought.”

Yahoo! has removed the ability to search blogs and the integration of Yahoo! News. According to Brian Nelson of Yahoo! this is only temporary while they retool.

There isn’t much buzz on this issue, so it isn’t something that you need to be overly concerned with … unless the “temporary” issue becomes “lengthy”.