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How To Distinguish Paid vs Organic Listings
A lot of people probably don’t even realize that the listings are paid and not organic. The listings themselves may look the same if the manager has used the same Titles & Descriptions for their pages. You can be identify these paid listings by this in the string http%3a//rdrw1.yahoo.com/click.

• Sample Search Submit Pro CPC Listing

Why Do I Care?
On a given Yahoo! search results page there are 10 organic listings and 14 PPC listings. When more and more paid listings creep into these natural 10 it reduces the amount of real estate left over for organic search results. Do you know how many organic spots are left for the keywords you’re targeting? While doing a few spot checks on popular keywords I noticed an alarming amount of CPC listings, some 50% or more. That means there are 19 PPC listings and 5 organic listings. That’s horrible. I was curious how this affected the different keyword markets. I grabbed the top keywords for each market KeywordDiscovery.com’s “Industry Terms” directory and to get a feel for the impact on heavily monetized keywords I then took the top keywords from this list of “top paying keywords“. I then checked the top 10 rankings for each and documented the # of paid listings found. Below are the results.

As you can see the top keywords listed in each industry are not heavily saturated with Search Submit Pro CPC listings. Only 32 of the 132 keywords, 24%, have CPC listings and only 4 of them, 3%, have 5 or more paid listings. This could be due to many of them being domain names and brand names. We then see that 70% of the keywords in the “Top Paying Keywords” list have Search Submit Pro! CPC listings, and 33% of those keywords have 50% or more CPC listings.

Reviewing these keywords you can see that the financial industry is pretty saturated. The majority of the keywords with 50% or more of the top 10 rankings being CPC listings are finance related. I decided to pull and evaluate the top searched keywords for the “loans” category. In the left column of the first graph below are the top 30 keywords returned for “loans” by KeywordDiscovery.com and the number of paid listings found in the top 10 rankings for each keyword. The second table is the same keywords and paid listing data but sorted in descending order of number of paid listings. When checking the rankings I see that 26 of the 30 keywords have at least 1 CPC listing representing an 86% saturation. Of these, 16 of the 30 have 50% or more CPC listings, representing 53% saturation. Some keywords like “home equity loans” and “online loans” are 100% CPC listings which means there are ZERO organic listings within the first page of search results on Yahoo!. Other gems are “loans”, “home loans”, and “cash loans” which weigh in with 9 of the top 10 results being paid listings from Search Submit Pro. Damn…that’s brutal.

I found this article from 2002 on SEW where Danny evaluated the Paid Content Disclosure on each search engne. As Danny states:

Yahoo: Paid listings sold by Yahoo are clearly labeled as “Sponsor Matches,” along with a helpful link that says, “What are Sponsor Matches?,” leading to a further explanation. As for paid inclusion, some “Web Site Matches” will be for sites that appear because they had to pay a mandatory fee to be reviewed. This is not clear on the search results page. Further, clicking on the “Help” link on the search page, while bringing up a page describing the search results, does not make clear some sites must pay a fee to be listed with Yahoo. Fail. Finally, for content promotion, this happens in the “Inside Yahoo” area, a clear-enough heading and which is also explained on the search help page.

Danny’s comment on the lack of disclosure within Yahoo!’s search results is still true today. That said, they have updated the information within their “About this page” section that is linked from the search results. It now states:

Web Results and Local Results may have financial relationships with Yahoo!, but have not paid for placement. Web Results may include links to sites that participate in the Content Acquisition Program (CAP). CAP enables content providers to submit web content directly to Yahoo! for review and inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index; content providers that participate in CAP through the Search Submit program pay for these services.

Web Results: Web Results are the most relevant web pages found in response to your search query. Web Results are generated from the billions of web pages discovered, crawled, reviewed, submitted, or otherwise included in the Yahoo! Search index. More than 99% of web pages in the Yahoo! Search index are included for free through Yahoo!’s web crawl process.

So, how does this factor into YOUR campaign and rankings?

Are the organic listings for your keywords being taken over by CPC listings?

Do you think consumers need to know these are paid listings?

Jason Calcanais launched a new human edited search engine called Mahalo.com.

There is a lot of coverage out there, including Andy, Tech Crunch, ZDNet, Threadwatch, Mashable, and Search Engine Land to name a few.

But I think Brian at Scoreboard Media said it best.  Check out his review here…it’s classic.

Laura Lippay, Yahoo’s SEO manager, posted a response to the recent topic about Yahoo! Autos cloaking.

There are dozens of groups within Yahoo who manage hundreds of products and properties that maintain some of the largest, most trafficked sites on the internet consisting of millions of pages and gobs of new content being pushed out all day long every day. This operation involves a good chunk of our 11,000 employees including project managers, designers, engineers, marketers and partners. For all of this activity and mayhem, there are a handful of us SEOs checking, recommending, emailing, chatting, educating, researching, reporting, testing and generally playing SEO supermom(/dad) .

No question that this is a difficult role and there will be things that slip through.  Sometimes in a company this large the best you can hope for is the 80/20 rule.

Kinda funny misunderstanding, but I could imagine the overcrazed, overhyped, yahoo doesnt follow their own rules, what on earth is going on, oh my god the world is coming to an end blog posts & comments like these if that engineering manager hadn’t caught this at the last minute.

I’m not sure if everyone else read it as such but I certainly didn’t think my post had the tone of “the world is coming to an end”.  But I did point out the hypocrisy and I stand by it.

We do continue to work on processes here for automating all SEO checkpoints on all pages that go out every day using a complex system of publishing and CMS tools, by automation, by hand, and/or by partners. In the meantime, we will continue to whisk through the halls like SEO superheroes with a keen eye for white on white, doing our best to save the Yahoo! properties from unintentional villainous blackhat ways.

First, I’d say that it looked pretty intentional.  Whether it was her intention or someone else’s intention is not the issue.

Second, I think it’s a great idea to have an automated system for SEO QA.  It wouldn’t be difficult to develop a system that would dynamically crawl a new site or product and analzye it for unique Title tags, Meta tags, <h> tags, etc, on each page.  The program could also check the keyword density on each page, ensure all pages are crawlable, report duplicate content, etc.  Checking for IP or agent delivery could also be built into this sytem.

To be continued……..

According to Techcrunch.com and Search Engine Land, Google is acquiring Feedburner for a juicy $100 million.  Pretty funny…we were just recently discussing this within the office as a possibility.  We all agreed it was a logical next step for Google to get its hands into the growing RSS market.  It also lets Google get a head start in the RSS feed advertising market which Feedburner is pushing.

According to Techcrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

Congrats to the Feedburner team.  The people I’ve met there are good guys and I wish them the best in the acquisition.

Interesting article at Webpronews.com today discussing a recent ban imposed on Netvertise, Inc. by the FTC. Apparently:

The FTC alleges the company violated federal law by selling franchises for Website design, promotion services, and SEO software under false claims.

In addition to the ban, Netvertise will have to return $160,000 to its customers, as part of a settlement, which is not technically an admission of guilt.

The FTC claims the company inflated the earnings customers would make with their services and Netspace SEO software to lure franchise buyers.

The FTC says Krasnow’s company misrepresented franchise incomes with unsubstantiated earnings claims, overstated the value of the Netspace software, and that the Netvertise provided consumers with “defective” disclosure documents.

Interesting…I’d never heard of them before. If they’re scamming innocent clients out of cash then this can only be a good thing.

Facebook.com is set to make a big announcement this Thursday, May 24th.   The Wall Street Journal and Cnet speculate that this announcement will bring another level of social media to the networking giant.

“On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.”

One quote in particular gives me the feeling that Facebook would like to become more of a content aggregator and/or publisher instead of a social networking website:

“Mr. Zuckerberg in the past has acknowledged he has greater ambitions for Facebook. He has bristled at Facebook’s “social networking” tag, instead calling the site a “social utility” that helps people share information, with their personal connections with each other as a backdrop. If others build services to take advantage of those connections, Facebook can become more useful for its users, he said in the March interview.”

Sound familar to Myspace News?  Hopefully not….as far as I know, Myspace News hasn’t really taken off since its launch.

Steve O’Hear at ZDNet.com and Paidcontent.org discuss how Facebook.com will become a platform on which companies can provide services within the Facebook pages.   Using this platform a company, or entertainer, or individual may be able to leverage their network to share content, or a product, or an offer, etc.  Of course this is all speculation at this point.

One of these options does seem like a reasonable next step for Facebook.com.  They are growing at an incredible rate, but if you don’t continue to improve your site and evolve you’ll eventually fade away.

On a seperate but related issue, what do you think of them rejecting acquisition offers and opting to stay private?  Do you think they have what it takes to go the distance?  They just seem so ripe for a buyout by a huge media company or Google.

I was doing some research to prepare for another post, but to my surprise I found something even juicier. Yahoo! is cloaking their (fixed typo for the professor) Autos pages, serving keyword stuffed pages to the SE crawlers and regular pages to the average users. I was browsing as Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler and therefore was able to see this.

Below are two screenshots. The first thumbnail on the left is what you will see on this page, http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html, if you are crawling as Slurp. The second thumbnail on the right is what you will see on the same page if you are surfing as a normal user.

So, they are clearly serving different content to their users and to the search engines. The pages they’re serving to the bots are heavily keyword stuffed. I honestly don’t know where they could cram the word “used cars” on the page again. It’s everywhere.

If you look on Yahoo!’s “Search Content Quality Guidelines” it states:

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted
Some, but not all, examples of the more common types of pages that Yahoo! does not want include:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
• Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

I’d say the page in question above falls into all of those items I highlighted above. Yahoo! is repeating the keyword “used cars” over and over to inflate their search engine rankings. The text is hidden from the user. It is giving the search engines different content than what the end-user sees. And lastly, this page is built primarily for the search engines.

Normally, I could care less if someone is spamming or using shady techniques. You do what you have to do to rank, and as long as you don’t take a shot at me, all the power to ya. I don’t believe in spam reports and I don’t believe in snitching on competitors. BUT, I don’t feel that this applies to the search engines. They are the ones placing the “quality guidelines”, penalizing websites, banning websites, and trying to enforce the rules that they’ve made up. And they penalize and ban websites for less than what Yahoo! is doing above. How is that fair? With one hand you’re going to ban a site and in effect reduce their revenue and with your other hand you employ the same strategies (or worse)? Come on now.

We built a widget in-house and released it to our consumers earlier this year.  This was our first widget so we pushed it as much as possible with a small level of apprehension due it being our first voyage in the world of widgets.

Since we developed the widget in-house we were able to add a static backlink at the bottom of the widget that would help our SEO efforts.  Users and webmasters are able to edit the code and remove the link if they choose to, but it appears as though most are leaving the link with the widget.  Each page online that shows the widget will also display a backlink to our site.

Today I checked the big three, Google / Yahoo / MSN, to see how many pages displaying our widget are indexed.

• Google = 4 pages indexed
• Yahoo = 20,600 pages indexed
• MSN = 2,047 pages indexed

What the hell is going on with Google?  A knee jerk reaction from some would be to ask if the widget was placed on low PR, low authority (in other words crap) pages, but that isn’t the case.  Due to the helpful nature of the widgets they’re being picked up and display on sites like MSNBC.com and a lot of local news station websites from around the country.

I got the numbers above by checking the string “powered by domain.com” in each, with quotes.  What’s interesting is that if I search for “powered by” domain.com, with the domain portion outside of the quotes, there are thousands of additional sites displaying the widget that show up in Google.  If Google has the pages indexed why wouldn’t it return them for the direct query?

Just finished reading some speculation and rumors floating around at Mashable.com and Telegraph.co.uk regarding a possible takeover of social networking site Bebo.com by Yahoo!.  It’s not coming cheap either.  Yahoo is reported to be in discussing a $1 billion acquisition.  Telegraph.co.uk reports that Bebo has an estimated 25 million users worldwide, compared with MySpace.com’s 100 million users.  Yahoo! has attempted to buy its way into the social networking scene before when they offered a large amount of money for Facebook.com, only to have their offer rejected.

Why would you care?  What would Yahoo! want Bebo? Mashable suggests:

Why would Yahoo buy Bebo? Possibly because without MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, they don’t have a major stake in the social networking realm. Flickr is fairly big, and they have lots of smaller social sites, but nothing generic that lets them integrate all their other services.

The big three, Yahoo! / MSN / Google, are all about expanding their empire as far as possible.  Increasing their piece of the search market (multi-million dollar ad campaigns).  Buying advertising and marketing firms (DoubleClick and aQuantive being purchased for billion dollar figures).  Acquiring social networking sites where users congregate (Youtube purchased for $1.65 billion).  I’m surprised it wasn’t MSN or Yahooo that bought Myspace.  I wonder if MSN will come in with the big dollars to buy Facebook?

DaveN’s got some solid advice on building links. Check out the full post here:

3 step plan on links

1) 1st batch of links: You need to gain your authority to play in that market place, but don’t over do it, being way too authoritative for an industry is sometimes worse than no authority at all. Try and get some links from press releases and on sites that don’t normally sell links.

2) 2nd batch of links: Once you have authority status get some blog love, but avoid Pay Per Post blogs for now. Take GetClicky.com: I’m not getting paid for that review or link, I did put my affiliate code in so I could see how many people I passed into getclicky.com and signed up… I’m geeky like that.

I think I have sent 180 people to date, 23 people signed up via my link, and only 13 people had balls to comment on my blog lol, but I will have passed a little of my authority onto GetClicky. Once you have enough blogs that have gained authority status linking to you, you’re set for stage 3.

3) 3rd batch is a free-for-all, you have gained authority and your stage 2 links should be pulling in the search terms. This means you will get scraper sites linking to you, so buy text link ads on lower grade sites, PPP and review-style sites. Your authority should pull you though.

Sometimes you’ve got to start slowly from step 1 with a new site or campaign.  Other times you’ll be lucky enough to inherit an authoritative site and you can skip right ahead to step 2 and/or 3 and start attacking the main keywords.