And they’re off… Again. More soap opera and cynicism erupts from three of the top performing search engines as Yahoo! sheds executives almost as fast as share value and Microsoft grumbles about Google being “anti-competitive”. Who needs WWE when you have giants like this wrestling each day?
Last week, Yahoo! lost even more top executives; Joshua Schachter (he of Delicious origin) and Brad Garlinghouse – this follows recent announcements from Caterina Fake and Steward Butterfield (of Flickr foundings), as well as search advertising exec Qi Lu and senior vice-president of search Vish Makhijani.
These names may mean little to anyone who does not follow the search scene but one thing which should be pretty obvious is that such a brain drain happening so quickly is unlikely to bode well for the engine. I would go so far as to say that Yahoo! is breaking apart and - without fast action soon - could lose its edge and its long-secure place as the world’s second most popular search engine.
It interests me, however, that the disintegration of Yahoo! is not being caused by any drop off in search engine figures. The number of people using search engines rises steadily; if Yahoo! ceases to be a main portal then MSN and Google will mop up their traffic. Search tools remain the best way for consumers to find their way around the web and if Yahoo! breaks, it will be as a result of self-destruction.
I’ve just noticed this morning that Yahoo! Site Explorer now allows you to filter indexed pages and inbound links by subdomain. Screenshots below.
Show Inlinks expect from this subdomain:
Show pages from: All Subdomains:
This looks like a useful report for websites which use multiple subdomains, enabling the option to remove internal subdomain links while still counting all other links from the same domain.
A couple of weeks ago I reported that Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland launched in beta, today I noticed that they have also rolled out a country specific Yahoo! Site Explorer for a wider range of countries.
So far I’ve noticed this for Germany, Australia, Spain, France and Italy. Looking at the results returned for inbound links these are returning different counts and appear to be heavily weighted towards inbound links from each specific country.
Following on from my original example which looked at links for www.bbc.co.uk, here are the results for the same search on Yahoo! Site Explorer Germany:
Yahoo!7 Site Explorer Australia shows a different set of results, many of which are from .au domains as opposed to .de from the German search or .it from the Italian results etc…
These results can certainly be useful if you are looking to find country specific links which may be influencing competitor rankings in google.com.au for example.
I noticed today that Yahoo! have launched Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland in beta. There seems to be no official announcement (or any other information on the web about this yet!) so I would guess it’s been released in the last couple of days.
Here are the results for an external inbound link search for www.bbc.co.uk:
Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland: 1,575,969
Yahoo! Site Explorer: 11,400,000
The reason for the fewer number of links on Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland seems to be because this is very UK focused, some non-UK links are listed but this mainly contains inbound links from .co.uk and UK hosted .com’s. These also seem to be ordered with strong UK and Irish links at the top of the page:
This could become very useful for UK-based competitor backlink analysis! 
Launching this week Yahoo Buzz is a Digg style service that works with a closed list of 100 sites that Yahoo has handpicked.
The most interesting part of the service is that the most popular stories will be promoted to the Yahoo homepage! Apparently a Wired story that was featured on the Yahoo.com homepage received 2 million unique visitors within 2 hours.
Yahoo will rotate stories that make the homepage and hopefully will be monitoring the traffic they send otherwise small sites will crash very quickly.
Apparently Microsoft might be buying Yahoo, a move that would have quite a big effect on SEO.
If the deal goes through then Microsoft is likely to pool the search algorithms and create something that can really rival Google. They would have a ready made market share and could pose a threat over the long term. In the UK I don’t think anybody would notice because Google is too far ahead but in the US the effect would be much larger. (Continue Reading…)
Yahoo is apparently in the process of integrating del.icio.us tags into their search results but I don’t think anybody in the UK will actually notice. Hitwise has reported that Yahoo has less than 2.05% market share over here now and don’t even feature in the top 4 search engines any more.
Most people in the UK only ever consider using Google to search. Some know about other search engines and are put off by the number of adverts, a lot say Google is just a better search engine.
Whatever the result it’s clear that even if Yahoo and MSN do something really amazing they can’t beat Google because not enough people know about them over here. The average web surfer wants nothing more than to find stuff, quickly. How can anybody compete with Google in this climate?
Google has always done very well by having a clean and uncluttered homepage. The usability aspects of this are made even more obvious when you compare results from a competitive search query such as “mobile phones” across both Yahoo and Google.
As you can see from the screenshots Yahoo only manages to fit 2 natural listings before the fold on my 22 inch monitor whereas Google has 6 results showing. This is why Google will always be most peoples favourite search engine and also why you don’t want to be outside the top 2 results on Yahoo.
A couple of weeks ago I setup a 301 redirect for ukgoogleconsultant.co.uk (an old domain I used ages ago), redirecting this to a new Google consultant webpage on the seoptimise.com domain instead.
Two weeks later here are the results:
Google
Yahoo!
- Old domain homepage still indexed, internal pages have disappeared though.
- New webpage also indexed.
- The old domain is still ranking in Yahoo at #5. Yahoo! seems to take ages redirecting pages, the current #1 result for this search is a Wikipedia entry for Google consultant which was redirected to their search engine optimization page around 6 months ago!
Windows Live
- New page indexed
- Old domain has 2 remaining webpages indexed, one of them the homepage.
- New version is the one appearing for live.com searches, which is still at #1.
So far I haven’t seen any other ranking increases throughout the seoptimise.com domain as a result of the redirect, but to be honest I wouldn’t have really expected this to have a noticeable effect anyway.
Having only submitted this site to Yahoo Site Explorer last week I was surprised to find some nice extra features which I hadn’t expected today.
Here’s a screenshot of the stats for www.seoptimise.com:
Just in case anyone else has taken as long as me, and perhaps didn’t see the point in submitting to Yahoo Site Explorer, here are 5 good reasons why you should authenticate your site:
1) Language information
Make sure Yahoo! knows the correct language of your website.
2) Last crawl date
When viewing your own site’s page’s you are listed with a date/time stamp for when each page was last crawled.
3) Subdomains
View the different subdomains Yahoo have indexed for your website.
4) Getting a new site indexed
For websites having problems with getting indexed in Yahoo! submiting to Yahoo Site Explorer can help to speed up the process.
5) Submit a site feed
Make sure Yahoo! finds your latest blog posts quickly by submitting your RSS site feed.
