Articles in The 'yahoo' Tag

Yahoo Has Unveiled a Newly Enhanced Mobile Experience

by Taylor Wilson

Yahoo recently broadened their mobile search display to enhance and expand their search results to provide a better mobile experience.   Yahoo’s new enhancements   improve how their search result pages are organized and displayed. Results are now exhibited in a more organized fashion displaying the latest web results, entertainment topics, local business listings, stock information, Twitter results, images, videos and news in order of relevancy.  

As you can see in the above screen shots, Yahoo’s mobile search results are now neatly packaged to better accommodate their mobile users and offer a better experience. Users can now find what they are looking for faster and more easily while on the move.

Yahoo’s new mobile search enhancements were made available at   http://m.yahoo.com for most iPhone owners and people using Android 2.0 and above. More devices and countries will get the new mobile search experience in future months.

Yahoo has taken a new approach and is catering their offerings to better suit the needs of smart phone users. They are taking into consideration user behavior on a mobile device being different than on a desktop or laptop. Yahoo is embracing an ever growing industry and has recognized the increasing importance of reaching consumers when they’re on the go, which all businesses should recognize at this juncture if they have not already.

Combat the Loss of Yahoo Organic Rankings with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns

by Gerard Tollefsen

Yahoo and MSN/Bing announced this week that you will now see “Powered by Bing” at the bottom of search results on Yahoo.  What we have been hearing since the initial announcement of the Search Alliance is finally coming to fruition; organic search results in Yahoo are now based on Bing’s index and algorithm.  If you have been hesitant to bid on keywords you already ranked well for in Yahoo, now might be a good time to rethink that strategy.  The fact is, most websites ranked differently in the two engines prior to the partnership and now that difference can directly affect your site’s performance and your company’s bottom line.

One strategy I believe is very relevant today, given the Yahoo-Bing search partnership, is leveraging the keywords from organic traffic and adding those keywords to your PPC campaign.  This approach takes on greater significance if your website historically ranked well in Yahoo, and not so well in MSN/Bing.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will see a major change in traffic to your site based on how well your site is ranked by Bing’s index. You can offset the loss of traffic from Yahoo’s organic rankings by adding the keywords you ranked well for into your PPC campaigns.

Hopefully you employ an analytics tool to analyze and identify sources of traffic and the keywords that drive people to your site.  Google Analytics (GA) is an excellent choice given its wide array of features and cost (it’s free!).  It is imperative you bridge the gap between Yahoo and MSN/Bing for any terms you held strong organic positions in Yahoo, but lack under the Bing index.  The quickest way to accomplish this is to incorporate those terms into your PPC campaign.  In this way, you can maintain a strong presence for search queries in Yahoo even if your organic rankings are buried by Bing’s algorithm, while you work to improve your organic presence.

Yahoo Powered by Bing

by Khrysti Nazzaro

Much has been written throughout the Search industry over the past few days, months, and years, relative to the “impending” Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo and the end of Yahoo Search as we’ve known it. And now the time has finally arrived, Yahoo organic search is 100% powered by Bing (in the United States and Canada, for now). Long gone are Paid Inclusion (since the end of 2009), Search Monkey, and the “Big 3” of search. All organic results in Bing and Yahoo are powered by the same Microsoft algorithm/index. What does it mean? Here’s a run down of other changes so far….

• Any positions your site had in Yahoo that you did not have in Bing are now gone — all rankings are dependent on your site’s ability to rank in Bing now, regardless of past performance in Yahoo.
• Yahoo Site Explorer and the Yahoo Directory are still intact.
• The average user of Yahoo and Bing remain separate demographics.
• The user interface and overall “look and feel” of Yahoo and Bing have remained separate and unique and the two engines are still competing on display advertising.
• Universal/Blended search results are displaying differently within the two engines — which means that a search in Bing may reveal image results, for example, interspersed within the Organic listings that aren’t shown for the same keyword query results in Yahoo.
• Optimizing for Bing is, in many ways, similar as for Google, with the exception that Bing’s index, overall remains much smaller. Your best bets continue to be to produce quality, thematic, and keyword-rich content — keyword-rich urls are also helpful.
• Paid search changes are continuing to transition and roll out separately.

What else will follow? Additions of new partners into the Search Alliance? Removal of Yahoo Site Explorer? The Yahoo Directory? Who Knows? Stay tuned for changes to the above … the Search Alliance continues to be an evolving entity in and of itself.