On October 11, 2002, Yahoo made significant changes in the way it performs searches. These changes are sure to cause a dramatic shift in search engine optimization strategy for most sites. This article will describe the changes, how you should adjust your SEO strategy, and what to look for in the future.
The Good Ole Days Our approach to search engine marketing for our clients has been to start with only a few high ROI opportunities. In the Good Ole Days (circa, 10/10/02) the top ROI was almost always Yahoo Express Submit for $299 a year. In just seven days, you ranked on the world’s most popular search engine.
The process was fairly straightforward:
1. Get the phrases the client thinks people will use to find the site.
2. Research to find the actual phrases people use, and perhaps find a few gems that don’t have too much competition.
3. Submit to Yahoo with a quality description that includes as many keywords as possible.
After getting clients on Yahoo, building a business case for other search engines became more complex. Yes, we like the rest of the world focused on Google, the SE that gets the second largest number of searches. However, Google’s PageRank algorithm makes it complex to make traffic predictions.
Google, the double-edged sword Google uses both page content and PageRank to determine results placement. Their content ranking is similar to other popular SE such as MSN, AltaVista and Lycos. In a nutshell, it works like this: put keywords in your title, put them in the body text a few times, sprinkle them in your alt tags, hyperlinks, comment tags, and you’re good to go.
It is the PageRank component that gets complicated. The more sites that link back to your site, the higher your page rank. Yet PageRank is more complex than that, involving the text in the links to your site and the popularity of the sites that link to you.
We always recommend that clients do basic search engine optimization, but how much they should spend is dependent on their existing PageRank.
To illustrate – take the example of two of our clients, both in the document management industry. The first project was a brand new website (www.adjacent-tech.com) for a start-up company. The second, a site redesign for an established mid-sized firm with a 10-year history (www.isogen.com). For the start-up we recommended only a few hours of basic page optimization, and then started them on a campaign to get links from partners, vendors, and other related sites. We recommended modest effort, e.g. low cost, for page optimization because, for a new site with low PageRank, the best optimized pages would not rank higher than their competition.
Since the second project was a re-design, they already had an established web site with the possibility a quality PageRank. As it turned out, there were several PhDs who sat on the W3C board (web standards organization) who wrote white papers, whose pages linked back to the Isogen site. After we salivated for a bit over their PageRank (a Pavlovian reaction for web developers) we recommended extensive optimization because they had a real chance of dominating their rankings.
The Future, For Now So what does all this Google stuff have to do with the Yahoo changes? Quite a bit actually.
Yahoo no longer displays its directory listings first in its search results. Instead, it now skips the sites in its directory to show Google’s listing. This means that a listing in Yahoo’s directory will not help your search ranking. Thus there is only one minor advantage to a Yahoo listing: some people search for sites using Yahoo’s directory listing, but very few do this in practice.
While it will take several months for the effects of this change to be understood, one fact is clear – Google is king. All your SEO effort should now go into Google.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Is the change a good thing or bad thing? The answer is complicated, and it depends on who you are.
One of our websites, www.10minuteflash.com, had a good position in Yahoo, and went from 200 hits a day to 15. Another site, www.websitedesignpromotion.org, had a weak description in Yahoo and lost only about 20% of its Yahoo traffic. Our creative design division, www.leveltendesign.com, was not listed in Yahoo at all and went from 0 to 40 hits per day.
Many webmasters are very upset by Yahoo’s change. Some have just paid, or even worse, had their clients pay $299 in the weeks preceding 10/10/02, only to find their listings worthless or at least “worth less.” Others, of course, have gained; and not those that actually paid Yahoo to be listed.
Looking into the Crystal Ball Yahoo had to make a change; they had progressively been loosing ground in the search engine race. Ironically, most of their users were lost to Google. It is my personal belief that the core problem with Yahoo was the poor and inconsistent quality of the human created text descriptions.
The new emphasis on Google will improve the quality of Yahoo’s searches. However, now that the results are identical to Google, there is no unique competitive advantage to use Yahoo. Additionally, Yahoo will start to loose significant income, as webmasters will no longer use Yahoo’s paid Express Submit. By some estimates, Express Submit nets over $200,000 a day.
I believe we will see another change in Yahoo’s searches shortly. It will probably weigh Google, or another 3rd party SE, with their own directory listings. Thus a directory listing will give you a boost in the rankings, making it again worthwhile to pay for a listing.
This will be similar to what MSN has done with the LookSmart directory and Inktomi page results, however, and it is not like Yahoo to be a follower. So we may see the emergence of a whole new model for us web consultants to research.
Tom McCracken is the Director of LevelTen Design, a Dallas based e-media agency. He has over 14 years of experience in software engineering and marketing. He has developed solutions to improve custom service and communications for some of the worlds largest companies. With an education in chemical engineering and economics from Johns Hopkins University, his background includes; web and software development, human factors engineering, project management, business strategy, marketing strategy, and electronic design.
