Yahoo

MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.
Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.

Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo’s market share is Google’s market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it’s not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It’s just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.
Wall street Journal reports
“The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world’s largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
“Microsoft’s share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing’s first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

Yahoo June 2009 search engine ranking update:

Yahoo updated its search engine index on 2nd of June. I can see a lot of shuffling happening most of our rankings got boosted. This is the 1st update in June 2009 I am happy to see yahoo keeping upto expectations.

Mini sitelinks a copycat idea from yahoo and MSN

Google has now introduced / testing mini site links. Sitelinks are links that are below a website which is felt authority for a particular keyword. If you search for your domain name you can see sitelinks in Google results. Now Google has copied the idea MSN and yahoo had been using for a long time. They are integrating site links inside the snippets displayed.

Check here:


Google has copied this idea from Yahoo and MSN. Internet is fully of copy cats and Google is no exception I feel.

Yahoo Makes money now from Yahoo search BOSS developer network:

BOSS is currently offered to developers free of charge. In the near future (likely late Q2 2009), we plan to implement a fee structure for API use above a set threshold.

BOSS will continue to offer free use of the API below a set daily threshold – up to 10,000 search queries per day depending on the type of API call. In addition, we plan to implement a service level agreement (SLA) in parallel with fees. We will announce firm timing and further details when we get closer to launch.

When we implement fees, we also plan to offer developers the ability to make non-time sensitive API requests at a significantly reduced price. This “off-peak” option can be used for research and analysis efforts to support building search experiences and would allow developers to request queries to be fulfilled by BOSS when capacity permits.

How Will Fees Work?

We currently plan to implement a fee system with the following structure:

· Fees will be determined based on the number and type of API requests made per day

· We are no longer restricting developers from monetizing their products using third-party platforms

· Fees will be determined using a unit system

· Units for Web, News, and Image BOSS API calls will be incurred based on the last result requested. For example, an API call requesting results 91-100 is the same cost as one requesting results 1-100

· Developers may request up to 1000 results in a single API call

· Units will cost $.10

· Developers will receive 30 units per day for free of charge

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html

Yahoo search update February 2009:

Yahoo has done a update to their index and I can see a lot of changes and shuffling of results for my client sites. Most of our client site rankings got boosted this time. Yahoo loves most of our client sites they sometimes act very weird when it come to ranking sites. Their ranking algorithm is the most difficult to rank as well as the most easy at times. There are sites we had been trying for months to rank in yahoo but none of the keywords are in first page but there are few sites which we just do work for a week and from 2nd week it tends to dominate for major keywords.
According to official Yahoo search blog, Sharad Sharma reports that they have done a yahoo search index update and this will affect ranking and indexing of websites. Sharad also mentions they have updated their algorithm this time I am sure it’s a minor changes because way I am seeing across most of our sites and client sites is that there is little or no movement and the few movement we see are all positive and upwards.
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/27/weather-report-yahoo-search-index-update-19/
According to Ysearchblog.com
“We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.
While we didn’t do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we’ll continue to provide these reports.”
I hope your sites are doing better.
Good luck with update.

Yahoo launched a new video platform

If you are website publisher, just like videos on the flickr’s new mobile site you will be able to use Yahoo’s video platform to convert your user’s uploaded clips into great looking, iPhone-ready video files.

On Thursday, Yahoo launched an updated version of mobile website for Flickr with the ability to playback Flickr’s short, 90-second video on iPhone and iPod touch. Various other devices like mobiles will also be supported very soon. Videos on flickr’s mobile site are processed using Yahoo’s new video platform, which works on the backend to transcode uploaded videos into the high-quality H.264 format. There is also a web API for feeding Videos into transcoder and for collecting the results.

After the demo session was held, some questions pass to the development team responsible for new video platform by flickr’s. Since the web API was being developed the various queries goes like this.
Will the transcoder API be made publicly available to webapp creators so they can include video in their creations?
What are the player software options developers have available to work with? Flickr in the browser is using flash now. The mobile site launches the quicktime player on iPhone. On the Nokia N-series it presumably launches the Nokia video player? Real players?
What other Yahoo properties will take advantages of this new video platform? News? Movie trailers? TV.Yahoo.Com?
Yahoo Developer Network Website will give details about the video platforms public availability.

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo update coming, yahoo will soon update their search index and there will be changes to their existing algorithm,

according to yahoo blog

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Value of yahoo directory comment by webmasterworld member

The value of a Yahoo! Directory listing goes up as your site becomes more popular. On Yahoo.com, but not on its international counterparts, listings are sorted by popularity and, supposedly, relevance. In the past two months, I got 4 visitors from a listing halfway on page 3 of a category three levels deep. That’s not too bad, especially considering that these are very targeted visitors with low bounce rates and an above-average number of pageviews per visitor. Admittedly, at 4 visitors every two months, or 24 per year, I am paying roughly $12.50 per click, and I am certainly not making that much per visitor to the site. Once Google Adsense statistics are included in Google Analytics, it will be interesting to see how valuable Yahoo! Directory traffic is for this particular site.
The site has been growing steadily for the past half year, and it will be equally interesting to see the shift in traffic when the listing moves up to the first page of the category. If you compare it to the traffic increase seen when you move up on a search engine results page for a particular query, a page one listing could be quite valuable, but that will, of course, depend largely on the popularity of the category.
A $300/month sponsor listing for the category would put me near the very top of the first page, which might be an interesting experiment if it weren’t for all the scary reports of billing issues related to sponsor listings. Also, they would have to send me over 250 visitors per day for it to be directly worth the money, which does not seem very feasible.
All in all, it depends too much on the category and on your position within that category, so there is no one answer to the question of whether or not it is worth to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory. If you have the money, find the appropriate category for your site and try to analyze it thoroughly before submitting. How many other listings and other types of links (e.g. sponsored listings and category links) does it contain? How many levels deep is it from the directory homepage? How many clicks does it take to get from the Directory homepage to your category? Some categories are linked directly from the Directory homepage. Will this link give my site an edge over my competitors? Consider the fact that you can cancel your listing after a year if it turns out not to be worth the money. Also note that there may be some other benefits tied to a directory listing, like increased trust in the eyes of particular search engines, as mentioned before. Hard to track, but worth considering.

Yahoo search engine update – Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo recently made an update to their index and ranking algorithm. We did see a lot of movement for our sites and our client sites.

As per the official yahoo search blog:

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. “

www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000625.html

If you notice changes to your website please post in comments

Ways to check backlinks in Google,Yahoo,MSN and other search engines.

I have many question me how to check the backlinks or links coming into their site in various search engines. Well i already wrote an article based on that here. http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm this article isey a bit old but works great still. Today the top 3 search engines are more friendly to webmasters and are willing to share a percentage of what they know about your backlinks.

1. Google: Traditionally Google used to show most of the backlinks to a site ( link: ) but way back in 2002 they broke that comment and started showing backlinks only with PR 4 and above. Then later in 2005 they broke that too and started showing very less sometimes less than 2% of backlinks a site really possesses. This is had been the case for more than 2 years. But in 20o6 started a massive webmaster communication programme. They opened up something called Google sitemaps ( now called Google webmaster central ) . Later they capitalized on that and due to massive support they got from webmasters and now the webmaster tools shows a lot of data very useful for webmasters. One of that is the backlinks to a site/page/from inner pages etc. To check the backlinks what Google shows you need to first verify your website to prove you are the owner. Now we can check backlinks if we login to Google webmaster tools here.

Once logged in and site verified:
We go to Dashboard >> Links and we can check backlinks what Google shows.

Remember even this is not accurate here google shows atleast 25% backlinks so you can count that what they are showing is somewhat correct.

Yahoo: Yahoo is the only search engine who never hesitated to share their backlink data. In yahoo we can just use link:http:// to check for a single page or linkdomain: to check for an entire site. There are lot of ways you can check backlinks in yahoo especially filtering out sites. Please check those stuff here.

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

MSN: MSN was showing backlink in link: command before a year but they broke the command and stopped showing all backlinks. Now they opened up communication and started http://webmaster.live.com/ where you can verify your site like Google and check backlinks.

Its good to see search engines share more with webmasters in recent days i hope we see more from them in future.

vijay

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