in-depth look into the new Yahoo!... also.... a virtual best practice guide to search engine marketing
History & future:
two phases in search... The first phase was all about what was on the page.
The second generation of engines started to look at what it was they could find out about that page by looking at what else there was on the web that gave more information about it. The directory listings, the connectivity, the anchor text etc. And we're still in phase two.
For me, and this is me speaking personally, the next phase will be where you're able to take into account information about the user. And of course local, because local search is a subset of personalisation. For local to really work, you need to know where the person is. So, the issue of: "I'm number one for this keyword"... may not exist at all in a few years. You know, you'll be number one for that keyword depending on who types it in! And from where and on what day... and... It is going to get more complex than something that can simply be summed up in a ranking algorithm, let alone how many checks somebody has on a toolbar.
NEW YAHOO:
This week saw the roll out of Site Match and I think it surprised a lot of people that there wasn't just a straight flick of the switch to Inktomi results with its old version of paid inclusion. That's not what happened, so do you want to bring me up to speed with the new model?
o Jon:
There are three components to the Site Match program.
The first is just, as you said, Site Match and that's the basic per URL submission. It's a subscription charge plus a cost per click. We do this for a number of reasons. If you take a look at what you would have had to have done to get into all the individual subscription programs, Alta Vista Express Inclusion, Inktomi Site Submit etc. You'd generate a subscription fee of over 150 dollars. But now the base fee, for the first year is 49 dollars and then drops for subsequent URL's. So it's much more economical. Especially for a small site that wants to get across a large network. Also, it means that people who are going into a category where they're going to generate a lot of traffic where there's very high value, they have a chance to do it on an ROI basis which they can measure. So it's a more tuned program that we're offering.
Site Match Xchange. And that's a similar program to Public Site Match, but it's for the commercial providers. It's an XML feed on a cost per click basis, very similar to what people were used to with Alta Vista and Trusted Feed as well as Index Connect. In addition, I have to mention that as always, about 99% of our content is free crawled in. And there is a free submission option now which covers the entire Yahoo! network...pages which are included in the Site Match Xchange program have to have unique titles and they have to have meta data
The Yahoo! directory is there for the different ways that people decide to look for information on the web. Some people like to parse a hierarchy, some people want to find other sites that are related within a certain category. And other people take the more direct route of: "I know what I want, I know the keywords..." and they just go directly to the search...The main reason that the Yahoo! directory exists is not to create connectivity or do anything specifically for Yahoo! search. The directory exists as a separate way for people to find things at Yahoo! Here you're dealing with several million pages instead of billions...
Is there a similar kind of relationship between the Yahoo! directory and Yahoo! search?
o Jon:The way that I would classify it is, that our relationship with the Yahoo! directory is very similar to that which we have with Open Directory. We also have a relationship with Open Directory Project. The way that we look at it for Yahoo! search, with all of its comprehensiveness and quality content is that, if we can find that somewhere, whether it's with a Yahoo! property or a third party, we want to have that content, we want to have that information and we want it reflected in the Yahoo! search index...But, you know, within the main search results, everyone is treated equally.
So, it's a wise decision to check in the Yahoo! database to see if you're already in there before you start thinking about subscriptions. But there may be some businesses who get the idea that, even if they are in the index, they may do better if they subscribe. You know pay to play. Are they likely to see any further benefit in doing that?
o Jon:
If by benefit you mean ranking - no there's not. It's an inclusion program. It is just about inclusion. It gives us an opportunity to use resources to go through and give them an editorial review of their site and puts them on a one-to-one relationship with the folks at Yahoo! And if you go to Site Match Xchange then you get some good customer service support. It's not going to do anything to influence their ranking. But let's take an example of say, a travel company. The Yahoo! Slurp crawler typically is going to come around and visit a site every three to four weeks. If you're a travel company... two weeks ago you wanted to sell Mardi Gras Getaways. But that's finished and nobody's buying those breaks now. It's Spring breaks for college students maybe. Now if your content changes that dramatically, having us come back and crawl your site every 48 hours may have a significant impact on your business. If you have a page which doesn’t change much, like consumer electronics... standard web crawl may be fine. There's a guy who came to see me earlier and he's doing an art exhibit and they won't have the pages ready until a few days before they're in each city. So waiting for the free crawl to come around may mean that they're not in when they need to be. It is an additional service and if it makes sense for people then they're welcome to take advantage of it. If they're happy with it and they're positioned well and have the crawl frequency, then use it. People who don't use the program will never be disadvantaged in the rankings as compared to other people who do.
o Mike:
Site Match Xchange is for sites with more than 1000 pages yes? Or is that 2000... Whatever... Is that when it starts to make sense to look at an XML feed when you're in the thousands like that?
o Jon:
That makes sense, but it may actually make sense before you get to those figures. It may make sense with 500 pages if you go through a reseller. The other thing with the XML feed is it does allow people to target things more specifically. We do an editorial review of all those XML feeds, and one of the reasons is, as you say, people are giving us meta data. And we do want to make sure that the meta data they're giving us corresponds to what the users expectations are...
meta keywords are back again! After all that time away, now they're alive and well at Yahoo! search...
o Jon:
Yes we do use meta keywords. So let me touch on meta tags real fast. We index the meta description tag. It counts similar to body text. It's also a good fallback for us if there's no text on the page for us to lift an abstract to show to users. It won't always be used because we prefer to have the users search terms in what we show. So if we find those in the body text we're going to show that so that people can see a little snippet of what they're going to see when they land on that page. Other meta tags we deal with are things like the noindex, nofollow, nocache we respect those. For the meta keywords tag... well, originally it was a good idea. To me it's a great idea which unfortunately went wrong because its so heavily spammed. It's like, the people who knew how to use it, also knew how to abuse it! What we use it for right now is... I'd explain it as match and not rank. Let me give a better description of what that really means. Obviously, for a page to show up for a users query, it has to contain all the terms that the user types, either on the page, through the meta data, or anchor text in a link. So, if you have a product which is frequently misspelled. If you're located in one community, but do business in several surrounding communities, having the names for those communities or those alternate spellings in your meta keywords tag means that your page is now a candidate to show up in that search. That doesn't say that it'll rank, but at least it's considered. Whereas, if those words never appear then it can't be considered.
o Mike:
So, the advice would be to use the meta keywords tag, as we used to do back in the old days, for synonyms and misspellings...
how many words in the title tag, how many characters...[laughs ]
o Jon:
We typically show, roughly 60 characters. That's the maximum we'd show. I'm not a professional copywriter, so I can't tell you "is short and punchy better than lots of information..." Individual sites have different kinds of content and they have to make their individual choice. For example, at Yahoo! sports, we want a very concise title tag. Somebody searching for the New England Patriots for Instance, a title like: New England Patriots on Yahoo! Sports. That's probably all we need as a title for a page that has that information. For other people if they're selling... a... Palm Pilot, well they may want to put in a title that says: ‘50% off the new Palm Zire X 1234’ and put the name of the store as a longer title may make more sense for them. Again, they have to depend on their copywriters to advise them what works best for clicks and conversions. So we'll index all of the title, but we'll only display 60 characters. You don't want to go past that because you don't want dot, dot, dot at the end of your title.
Let's talk Spam! Of course it's a huge problem with search engines. People who are creating web pages in the industry worry so much about what they're doing with the pages and how they're linking and submitting... and will I get banned... I get asked a lot of questions like: "If I link to my other web site will they know it's mine and ban me?" Or: "My hotel is in New York, New York, will I get banned for keyword stuffing?" Crazy worries. I guess for most of the smaller businesses which aren't up to speed with search engine optimisation, they hear a lot of propaganda which worries them. But at the other end of the scale, I tend to hear more from you guys at the search engines about the activities of less ethical affiliate marketers out there. Now those guys certainly live by their own rules. How do you deal with it?
o Jon:
Well let me just say first that, in that sense Spam has gotten a lot better over the years. You don't really much have people trying to appear for off topic terms as they tended to. You now have people who are trying to be very relevant. They're trying to offer a service, but the issue with affiliate Spam is that they're trying to offer the same service as three hundred other people. And the way we look at that is... we look at that the same as we look at duplicate content. If someone searches for a book and there are affiliates in there, we're giving the user ten opportunities to see the same information, to buy the same product, from the same store, at the same price. If that happens, we haven't given our user a good service or a good experience. We've given them one result. So we are looking at how we can filter a lot of this stuff out. There are a lot of free sign up affiliate programs. They've pretty much mushroomed over the past few years. The plus side is, they're on topic. They're not showing up where they shouldn't... it's the other way... they're showing up too much where they should [laughs] We look at it like this: what does a site bring to the table? Is there some unique information here? Or is the sole purpose of that site to transact on another site, so that someone can get a commission... if that's the case, we'd rather put them directly in the store ourselves, than send them to someone else who's simply telling them how to get to the store.
o Mike:
You guys must get Spam reports the same as all the other engines. So when somebody does a search on a particular product and it turns up that there are ten affiliates in there, whether they're Spamming or not, it's likely that the affiliates could be turning up before the merchant ever does. If you get a high level of that occurring, do you ever go back to the merchant with some feedback. You know, say like, guys do want to optimise your web site or just do something about your own ranking?
o Jon:
We do actually talk to a lot of companies. We obviously have a relationship with many of them through the various Yahoo! properties. Different companies often take a different tack. For instance, a company which has been very, very good on listening to us is eBay. I have to say is a company which has been very good at working with us and listening to us on the affiliate issue. Their feeling is really twofold: One is, the people that are confusing the results in the search engines are the same people who are doing things that they don't like on eBay. And for them they tend to see bad actors in one space and bad actors in another. The other thing, of course, is if you have someone who is using a cloaked page, and so, to a search engine it's a huge bundle of keywords and massive interlinking of domains on different IP's and for a user coming in with IE 5, it's an automatic redirect to pages on eBay... they know that the user doesn't think: "Oh it's an affiliate Spammer. The perception for the user it's simply this: eBay tricked me! There's a link that I clicked that said "get something free" I clicked it and ended up on eBay. And they wonder why eBay would do that to them. And they know that those things hurt their brand. So that's why they have been very proactive in working with us to ensure that those kind of affiliates are not part of their program. But... some other merchants may look at it and say: since we're paying on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis we're actually indifferent as to how that traffic comes to us. They may say, it's like, we don't want to monitor our affiliates, or we can't monitor our affiliates... whatever, we'll take the traffic because there's no downside. It's a different way that they may look at it. And you know, it depends what position they're in, and more, how much they care about their brand, or don't care...
o Mike:
And a similar kind of thing happens on the paid side. I don't want to get too much into that because this is the organic side and I don't want you to get too embroiled in that as I don't know if you're much connected with it. But in PPC with a campaign you can only bid once on the same keyword. It's not possible for you to fix it so that you can turn up at one, two and three on the paid search side. So, what tends to happen there is that, the merchants don't mind if the affiliates are bidding on the same keywords. So one way or another, it's likely that, if they can't hold all the positions down the right hand side, the affiliates will help them. And at least that way they get the sale anyway.
What is it that gets you banned - if at all? Is it cloaking, mini networks...
o Jon:
Mike there isn't an exhaustive list. There are new technologies coming out all of the time. At the highest, or fundamental level, someone who is doing something for the intent of distorting search results to users... that's pretty much the over arching view of what would be considered a violation of our content policies. In terms of specifics... um.. let's do some notes on cloaking. If you're showing vastly different content to different user agents... that's basically cloaking. Two different pages - one for IE and one for Netscape with the formatting difference between those, or having different presentation formats for people coming in an a mobile device perhaps, or just different type of GUI that's acceptable. That's helpful.
Massively interlinked domains will most definitely get you banned. Again, it's spotted as an attempt to distort the results of the search engine. The general rule is that we're looking at popularity on the web via in-links. The links are viewed as votes for other pages. And part of voting is that you can't vote for yourself. And people who buy multiple domains and interlink them for the purpose of falsely increasing popularity, are doing that, just voting for themselves. And the same applies with people who join reciprocal link programs. Unfortunately there are many people who join these because they're fairly new to search engine marketing and maybe someone tells them that this is a great way to do things. That's very dangerous. People linking to you for financial or mutual gain reasons Vs those linking to your site because it's a great site, a site they would go to themselves and would prefer their visitors to see, are doing it the wrong way. Let's just take the travel space again. Someone who has 30 pages of links buried behind the home page, literally each with several hundred links, with everything from... golf carts, to roofing, to... who knows. You know that's kind of like: hey if you like our travel to Jamaica site, you may also be interested in our roofing site... [Mike and Jon burst out laughing here]
o Mike:
It's a shame really. People seem so desperate for links but frequently just have no idea where they're going to get them from. It's my mantra over and over again, and I know you've heard me saying it many times at the conferences: the importance is in the quality of the links you have - not the quantity. And of course, everyone wants to do incoming links. They don't want to do reciprocal linking. They even worry too much about whether they should link out themselves. Getting links in is a lovely blessing, but should people worry too much about linking out?
o Jon:
The thing to remember here Mike, is about who you're linking out to. If you hang out in bad neighbourhoods as we say, then you will get more scrutiny, that's inevitable. If you end up linking to a lot of people who are bad actors and maybe have their site banned -- then you linking to them means you're more likely to be scrutinised to see if you're part of that chain. The other thing, of course, is, when you take a look at connectivity, every site has a certain amount of weight that it gets when it's voting on the web and that is based on the in links. And they get to distribute that...energy... via its out links. And by that, I mean outside the domain. Navigational links and other links within a domain don't help connectivity, they help crawlers find their way through the site. I'm just talking here about the true out links. Those outside of the domain. For those... how much each link counts is divided by the number that exists. So if you have a couple of partners, or suppliers you're working with and have an affinity with, if you link out to them - then that helps a lot. If you have... 3,4,5 of them... well if you added 300 random reciprocal links, then you've just diluted the value of the links that you gave to the other people you have the real relationship with. It's as simple as this, people who have massive link farms aren't really giving much of a vote to anyone because they're diluting their own voting capability across so many other people. So you need to consider the number of out links you have on a page, because each additional link makes them all count for less.
posted by Jen @ 10:07 AM
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