Today is a sad day for those of us in the SEO industry. Yahoo Site Explorer is being boxed for good and as of today will be the last day you will be able to use it. Yahoo announced on Friday 18th that they would be that they would be shutting down the service. Many in the SEO industry are regarding this as the final demise of Yahoo Search.
“With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.”
This follows through on a previous announcement from July 11, 2010 that they service would soon be suspended due to falling use of Yahoo and the transition of Yahoo to Bing.
“In an August 2010 blog post, we said we would continue Site Explorer with a focus on new features for webmaster community, even after the transition to Microsoft platforms is complete. We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value. Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”
Yahoo Site Explorer went live in September of 2005 and was the progeny of Tim Mayer from Yahoo. It has been a powerful mainstay of the SEO industry ever since it’s initial launch. While most of us in the industry knew this day was coming, it is still tragic news for many SEOs who have come to rely on Yahoo Site Explorer as a free, comprehensive and search engine backed competitive analysis link tool.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 11:00 am
For those of you who have noticed significant fluctuations in your rankings – you’re not alone. Across the web people have reported significant changes in their rankings. We at Beanstalk were fortunate on this one in that we had ranking reports running for the past few days and got to watch the changes over the course off the report. A happy coincidence. 
Unfortunately the algorithm shift isn’t particularly favorable to solid site optimization. There was an odd connection is what we’re seeing. Site that had link building that focused on high relevancy and high trustability lost ground and sites who’s links building was focused on volume in recent months have gained ground. This indicated a shift to volume over quality. For obvious reason we’re convinced that this shift won’t last.
This shift in quality isn’t just apparent in the sites we’re working on but as we analyze various sites across the web we’re noticing a larger degree of lower quality backlinked sites ranking.
Now – to be sure we’re always in favor of diversified link building strategies and that includes strategies that focus more on volume and other strategies that focus on trust and relevancy but from everything we can see indicates that this update puts a disproportionate emphasis on volume. I expect to see the rankings shift again – likely over the weekend.
I should note that this isn’t just something we’re noticing but that has been noticed by a wide array of SEO’s. My advice? Don’t react too quickly – corrections are coming and you don’t want to adjust the wrong way.
And in other news …
And also noticeable in the current ranking report we’re running for our clients is the merging of Yahoo! and Bing search results. A couple days ago Yahoo! announced that their organic results in North America were being fed by Bing. This is of course the first set of ranking reports though that have refected this. This is (in my opinion) very exciting news and you can read more about it on Search Engine Journal here.
And stay tuned – I’ll be posting more as the Google update continues.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:13 am
Well, it’s been a long time since my last blog post. I apologize for this and will be working hard to try to be more active in the social world of the web. As you know – in this industry things move pretty fast and while I definitely can’t recap the last couple weeks, I can start anew with the recent going’s on – some interesting news going forward and an update on Google. First – let’s talk about what’s going on right now:
Today on Webcology (my radio show) Jim Hedger and I discussed privacy including an Italian’s court’s assertion that Google executive are responsible for the material uploaded to YouTube (yikes), an interview with the Ontario privacy commissioner, and a lengthy discussion on what should and shouldn’t be private (and who’s responsibility is it anyways – is Facebook REALLY responsible for your privacy or should YOU take a second to think about what you’re adding to a social network (key word – social) and understand that once you add it – it’s no longer private information). It was a great show and is the first in a series of interviews and information on privacy issues and concerns.
Yahoo! & Bing are finally sitting in a tree. The deal has been approved and Bing will soon (hopefully by the end of 2010) be feeding Yahoo! organic results and Yahoo! paid search will power Bing paid results (they hope by Q4 of 2010 but in my humble opinion it’s more likely in Q1 of 2011). Can I hear a – FINALLY !
And for those of you who are as geeky as I am – there’s a great webinar series this weekend. 30 webinars in one weekend on a wide array of topics. it’s going to be a wild ride with tons of great info and PRIZES. With reps from the major engines and great presenters such as Shawna Fennell, Stoney deGeyter, Jennifer Laycock and many many more (including your truly on Saturday at 12PM) you just know it’s going to be great. Hope to see you there and good luck winning one of the many great prized from netbooks to $5000 design packages. So get your Twitter account loaded, step in front of your favorite browser and buckle up. To register go to http://www.newlifeevent.com/.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:42 pm
Well, it’s been a long time since my last blog post. I apologize for this and will be working hard to try to be more active in the social world of the web. As you know – in this industry things move pretty fast and while I definitely can’t recap the last couple weeks, I can start anew with the recent going’s on – some interesting news going forward and an update on Google. First – let’s talk about what’s going on right now:
Today on Webcology (my radio show) Jim Hedger and I discussed privacy including an Italian’s court’s assertion that Google executive are responsible for the material uploaded to YouTube (yikes), an interview with the Ontario privacy commissioner, and a lengthy discussion on what should and shouldn’t be private (and who’s responsibility is it anyways – is Facebook REALLY responsible for your privacy or should YOU take a second to think about what you’re adding to a social network (key word – social) and understand that once you add it – it’s no longer private information). It was a great show and is the first in a series of interviews and information on privacy issues and concerns.
Yahoo! & Bing are finally sitting in a tree. The deal has been approved and Bing will soon (hopefully by the end of 2010) be feeding Yahoo! organic results and Yahoo! paid search will power Bing paid results (they hope by Q4 of 2010 but in my humble opinion it’s more likely in Q1 of 2011). Can I hear a – FINALLY !
And for those of you who are as geeky as I am – there’s a great webinar series this weekend. 30 webinars in one weekend on a wide array of topics. it’s going to be a wild ride with tons of great info and PRIZES. With reps from the major engines and great presenters such as Shawna Fennell, Stoney deGeyter, Jennifer Laycock and many many more (including your truly on Saturday at 12PM) you just know it’s going to be great. Hope to see you there and good luck winning one of the many great prized from netbooks to $5000 design packages. So get your Twitter account loaded, step in front of your favorite browser and buckle up. To register go to http://www.newlifeevent.com/.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:42 pm
I just found out about this one earlier today and I have to say – that the big three got together on this one is a great step for their respective indexes and a great way to control duplicate content issues.
I can’t possibly outline what the new tag is an does any better than Matt Cutts.
And to make matters worse (in the form of making the sources I reference appear VERY small) I’ve got another video for you. So that’s two posts in one day, both referencing Matt Cutts and both with interviews from WebProNews. There are more resources below. But first – the video:
Here some additional followups and resources related to the new Canonical tag:
Joost comes up with some great plugins for common content systems. Click here for more information and perhaps to contact Joost directly and find out when he sleeps.
Jim Hedger writes about this over on the Webmaster Radio blog (Note: link removed as the post has been removed in a redesign).
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 1:55 am
Inspired by a combination of an excellent research paper from Richard Stokes of AdGooroo, Google’s Q2 earnings report and the recent happenings in the now getting tiring story of Yahoo! and Microsoft – the most recent article by Beanstalk’s Dave Davies is out today. Titled, “The Search Landscape Reflected In Paid Results” it discussed some of the recent changes, how they’re affecting the search engines themselves and what we can expect to see in the paid and organic results because of this.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 8:15 pm
Back on February 13th we reported here that a paid listing on Business.om had killed the Yahoo! results for a client of ours. We had the listing removed from Business.com and I spoke with them and asked that any feeds sent to Yahoo! not include our client.
One of the indicators of the issue was that the page was caching at 89k on Yahoo! and was actually redirecting through Business.com when clicked. A few days after the removal of the site from Business.com the cache size returned to normal.
Well, we are pleased to announce that as of last Friday (the 7th) the rankings are back.
So we can confirm that it’s a pretty quick bounce-back if you’ve got a Business.com listing and watched your rankings on Yahoo! tank.
Hopefully this isn’t you but if it is – you know what to do (and sorry to our friends over at Business.com but head’s up – this is something you REALLY need to address and address it FAST).
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 1:53 pm
Back on February 13th we reported here that a paid listing on Business.om had killed the Yahoo! results for a client of ours. We had the listing removed from Business.com and I spoke with them and asked that any feeds sent to Yahoo! not include our client.
One of the indicators of the issue was that the page was caching at 89k on Yahoo! and was actually redirecting through Business.com when clicked. A few days after the removal of the site from Business.com the cache size returned to normal.
Well, we are pleased to announce that as of last Friday (the 7th) the rankings are back.
So we can confirm that it’s a pretty quick bounce-back if you’ve got a Business.com listing and watched your rankings on Yahoo! tank.
Hopefully this isn’t you but if it is – you know what to do (and sorry to our friends over at Business.com but head’s up – this is something you REALLY need to address and address it FAST).
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 1:53 pm
We have a client. Alright, we have more than one but there’s one client specifically that I’ll be writing about here – let’s call him Bruce. Bruce decided one day to purchase a Featured Listing on Business.com. Now, by itself this isn’t a bad idea. In fact, in many cases it might even be a good one – but not for poor Bruce.
We noticed that overnight Bruce’s Yahoo! results tanked going from page one to … well … let’s just say “not page one”. We also noticed that the cache size of the page suddenly jumped to 89k. As an FYI, the page is NOT 89k and Google has it cached at a mere 16k. So we knew something was wrong but it took a few days before I decided to actually click on the Yahoo! result for the site.
The address bar flickered just a little too much and I tried again. Looking closely you could watch it go from the Yahoo! search address to the Yahoo! tracking URL to a business.com redirection address to the client’s URL with ?trackcode=bizcom tacked onto the end. About the same time all this happened (the site dropped in the results for most but not all phrases) the client also noticed an increase in the cost of their ad spend. So Business.com was profiting off of actions that hurt my client’s overall ROI and Yahoo! was a participant though I’d yet to figure out whether this was a genuine glitch or a revenue generation scheme that just didn’t work out.
The best information I’ve found on this issue thus far is on SERoundtable.com in their post at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002604.html.
A call to business.com did seem to get some results (i.e. “they’ll work on getting the site removed”) but I’ll keep you posted as to how that works out.
So take this as a warning. If you’re enjoying solid Yahoo! results and the traffic they provide – avoid a business.com listing like the plague.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 2:04 pm
With rumors of a layoff spree in the not-too-distant future, it appears that the future is really here at Yahoo! Reinforcing the “noone is safe” aspect of what we’ve been told by Yahoo!, VP of Marketing Todd Daum is rumored to have been laid off earlier today. I first head of this layoff over at ValleyWag.com. They’re also providing some links to other related reading so worth the read. You can read the news here.
The total number of Yahoo! employees laid off today is slightly higher than predicted at 1,100 bringing the total number of employees there down to about 13,200. There’s a good writeup of the scale of the layoffs and surrounding environment on the News.com site here.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:15 pm
Older Posts »
Copyright© 2004-2012
Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc.
All rights reserved.
