WebProNews

On October 11, 2002, Yahoo has made a significant change 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 could ranked on the worlds most popular search engine. The process was fairly strait forward: 1. Get the phrases the client thought people would use to find their site 2. Research to find the actual phrases people used, and hopefully find a few gems that did not have too much competition. 3. Submit to Yahoo with a quality description that included as many keywords as possible. After 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 next largest number of searches. However, Google’s PageRank algorithm makes it complex to make traffic predictions. Google, the two sided sword Google uses both page content and PageRank to determine results placement. The content ranking is similar to other popular SE such as MSN, AltaVista and Lycos. In a nutshell, put the keywords in your title, put it a few times in the body text, and sprinkle it in your alt tags, hyperlinks, comment tags and your good to go. It is the PageRank component that gets complicated. Basically, the more sites you have linking back to your site the higher your page rank. Again, in a nutshell, 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 to spend is dependent on their existing PageRank. To illustrate this, we can take the example of two of our clients that are 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 re-design for an established mid-sized firm with a 10 year history (www.isogen.com). For the start-up we recommended only a few hours doing basic page optimization and 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 with 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, they had several PhD’s who sat on the W3C board (web standards organization) and wrote several white papers, all with links back to their site. After our salivating for a bit over their PageRank, a Pavlovian reaction for web developers, we recommended extensive optimization because they have 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 display’s it’s directory listings first in their search results. Effectively 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 do search for sites using the directory listing, but very few do this. 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 The question is raised, is this, a good or bad thing? The answer is it depends on who you are. One of our websites that was positions well in Yahoo, www.10minuteflash.com, 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. On the other site, our creative design division www.leveltendesign.com, which was not listed in Yahoo, went from 0 to 40 hits a day. Many webmasters are very upset by this change. Some have just paid, or even worse had their clients pay $299 in the weeks proceeding 10/10/02 only to find their listings worthless or at least “worth less”. Others have of course have gained; only it’s not those that actually paid Yahoo to be listed. Looking into the Crystal Ball Yahoo had to no doubt 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. This change will in general 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 due to webmasters no longer using their paid Express Submit. By some estimates Express Submit produces 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 however be like MSN has done with the Looksmart directory and Inktomi page results 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.