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Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
Yahoo! has decided, after eight years, to spend some energy improving Flickr. This is great news.
Specifically, there are three new improvements to Flickr that I think make it worth sharing photos (and videos) to again. Here they are (in a nutshell):
- 1 terabyte of space for storing photos and videos
- Access Flickr from anywhere on any device
- You can share videos up to 3 minutes in length
And, as an added bonus, Flickr looks nicer too.
Besides, these cool new improvements to Flickr, you can also share your photos in full resolution, a bonus if you are a professional photographer.
So What Can Flickr Be Used For?
Bloggers used to use Flickr as a place to store photos that they could use for their blogs. Today, WordPress makes that a whole lot easier. But if you aren’t using WordPress, or if you do other kinds of content marketing online using services like Squidoo and HubPages, then Flickr is still a great place to store and share photos. And with 1 terabyte of storage space, you should never run out of storage.
I don’t think paying for services like Dropbox is necessary unless you’ve got so many photos and videos that sites like Flickr are too primitive. In that case, store your limit on Flickr then buy a premium Drobox account.
Tags: blogging, Flickr, photos, videos, yahoo
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Monday, May 20th, 2013
USA Today reported today that Yahoo! has purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The funny thing is they promise “not to screw it up.”
People who have followed Yahoo! around for the past decade understand that comment. They have a bad habit of buying up properties only to close them down or do nothing with them. It’s a running joke in Internet marketing circles.
Joke aside, however, is it possible that Yahoo! could renege on its promise? It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen because there’s a new CEO at the helm. Marissa Mayer, a former Googler, understands the value of high profile acquisitions. By virtue of her place at Google for so many years, she knows a good thing when she sees it. Now is her time to prove it.
Something caught my eye in the USA Today article, though.
Tumblr is also ahead of Yahoo in chasing after customers who use smartphones to access their sites, Mayer said. More than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app and conduct an average of seven sessions per day, Mayer said.
This could be an opportunity for Yahoo! to capture the smartphone market. If so many Tumblr users are tuned into their smartphones, then it could be the place where Yahoo! shines in terms of future revenue and market share. Yahoo!’s advertising model is way less expensive than Google’s. The question is, how will they capitalize in their differences in the coming decade?
Tags: mobile marketing, smartphone marketing, smartphones, Tumblr, yahoo
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Friday, May 17th, 2013
Twitter and Google got their very public divorce in 2011 after a brief flirtation period with realtime search. Since then, Google has deployed Google+ to mostly positive results. Twitter has been dating and looking for a replacement. Now, they’re in deep with Yahoo!
This is an interesting partnership for several reasons.
- First and foremost, Yahoo! is not a search giant. They enjoy only 5% of the search market. Still, that’s a big market when you think about it. Yahoo! is still one of the most trafficked websites on the Web.
- This deal looks to be better for Yahoo! than Twitter on the surface of things. I mean, what’s to be gained from this relationship for Twitter other than having additional capital to use for other things? Yahoo! is getting a big asset to beef up its SERPs.
- The announcement indicates that Yahoo! is planning to beef up its content with tweets in the following areas: “sports, entertainment, music, and more.” It’s unclear how it will benefit regular search marketers.
Nevertheless, I expect that there will be ways for the run-of-the-mill search engine marketer to capitalize on this relationship – particularly if you are in one of the above-mentioned niches.
What do you think? Is this a good deal for Yahoo!? How about Twitter?
Tags: search engine marketing, Twitter, yahoo
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, May 13th, 2013
Google might have the lion’s share of the search market, but Bing and Yahoo! are still important. Between them, they have close to 15% of the search market. Of course, they fluctuate up and down and at times have a total of 20% between them. Usually, Bing has a little more than Yahoo! and that’s okay. Not everyone can be on top.
While all the search engines generally look at some of the same criteria, there are differences.
Bing is more closely aligned with Facebook. You can push your Bing rankings higher if you have a strong Facebook network and promote your links to your Facebook friends. Google has its own social network with Google+. Yahoo!, however, seems to be more interested in domain names with age. Google likes aged domains as well, but with over 200 ranking algorithms any one ranking factor is going to have less influence on its own.
The differences between the search engines tell me that diversity is very important. You don’t want to rely on just one search engine for all of your traffic. You want to diversify your traffic sources.
This is very important. If some new website next year starts taking traffic away from Google and the search giant fades into oblivion (remember MySpace?), then you will be thankful you diversified your traffic sources. That’s why Bing and Yahoo! are still important.
Tags: bing, google, search engines, search marketing, website traffic, yahoo
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
Don’t write Yahoo! off yet. CEO Marissa Mayer, a former Googler, has a lot of tricks up her sleeve, and I’m betting on her.
According to this article at TechCrunch, Yahoo! is planning a comeback in search, video, and mobile. Recent acquisitions show that they’re serious. In fact, Yahoo! has deep pockets, and if they continue to make smart acquisitions, then I think you’ll see them become big competitors against Google and Facebook.
Here are three specific reasons why I think Yahoo! is still in the game:
- Its acquisition of OnTheAir – OnTheAir is a video app that allows users to set up their own webinars. If Yahoo! can take advantage of this technology, they can build an online app that will compete with Google Hangouts.
- Its acquisition of Stamped – Stamped is a mobile app. Making good use of this app can give Yahoo! enough clout to compete with Google’s Android product, and if Facebook gets into mobile to compete for this space, then it could become an all out war. This is a huge opportunity for Yahoo! because no one is dominating here yet.
- Personalization – Yahoo! was the first big web property to let users personalize a home page. They did it long before Google ever thought about it. Personalization in search has become a big deal that Google has managed to position itself as a leader in. And Bing isn’t strong enough to compete against Google on any playing field. But Yahoo! is. If Yahoo! can take its current technology to learn enough about its user base to deliver personalized content, then it can become a major player again.
Yahoo! has an interesting challenge ahead of it. I don’t think they’ll knock Google off their pedestal, but they could be a competitor again. I’m rooting for Yahoo! to build a search brand that can give Google a run for its money.
Tags: mobile apps, personalized search, search, search engine, video, yahoo
Posted in search engines | No Comments »
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Yahoo! has announced that today spells the death of a search tool that has been with us since 2005. That was when Yahoo! actually tried to be a search engine.
Yahoo! Site Explorer is no more.
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that many webmasters used to see who was linking to them, and who was linking to their competition. For years, every webmaster who wanted real live link metrics used it. Even those search marketers who gloried in the death of Yahoo! at one time sang the praises of Yahoo! Site Explorer. It was the best free link popularity tool on the Web for the longest time.
But now it’s dead.
What this means to webmasters is that we will be relegated to using paid-for-services for the best and most accurate link data. Yes, you can use Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, but neither one of them shares the same information on links that Yahoo! Site Explorer was known for. If you want that data today, you’ll have to pay for it.
That might make the information sellers happy, but even Rand Fishkin, whose MozRank is very popular, is singing a dirge for the death of Yahoo! Site Explorer.
R.I.P. Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Tags: search tools, yahoo, Yahoo! Site Explorer
Posted in Tools for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
It’s not often that all three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) team up together on a project, but this time the project is well worth the mutual cooperation. The three search giants have partnered to launch the site schema.org, which helps webmasters define structured data for their websites for easier searchability.
First, you might be wondering what is structured data? It is also called microdata, or microformats. This is a type of markup that defines more narrowly specific content on a web page that humans might understand when they read the text content, but that search engines would have a difficult time understanding from the text.
The Schema.org website uses this example:
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
(note: replace * with < and >)
Avatar is a term that can be used in more than one context. For example, it could refer to the movie or it could refer to your Web graphic or profile picture. The simple html tag H1 tells browsers how to render the text, but it doesn’t tell search engines the particular context of the reference.
To fix this, you could add a schema to your html code to tell the search engines what “Avatar” means. If you are referring to the movie, then you’d enter code that looks like this:
*div itemscope*
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
*span*Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) */span*
*span*Science fiction*/span*
*a href=”../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html”*Trailer*/a*
*/div*
Itemscope is the schema and the content that falls between the div tags is the microdata that defines that schema.
The brilliance of schema is that it is flexible, so flexible in fact that webmasters can define their own schema beyond the definitions offered by the search engines. If those schema become popular enough, then the search engines will begin to use them for search indexing purposes.
I encourage you to look over the schema.org website and see if you can identify any web pages that could benefit from defining microdata. It could push you up a little in the rankings by helping the search engines define your content a little more clearly.
Tags: bing, google, microformats, schema, yahoo
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Saturday, May 28th, 2011
At one time, it seemed that no one could topple Yahoo! from the top of its mountain as king of online display advertising. It seemed that nobody really wanted to. Until now. And that somebody is, of all entities, Google.
Last year, Google owned 13.3% of the display ad market online. Yahoo! had 13.6%. This year, the numbers are 14.7% and 12.3% for the first quarter, respectively.
But don’t take from this that Google is taking Yahoo!s advertisers away. They aren’t. Yahoo!s target market are big corporations who advertise on television. Google’s target market are PPC advertisers who are now trying online display advertising. Completely different markets.
While all of that is interesting to note, there are two other bits of interesting data the AdAge article shares. First, online display advertising is growing overall. More companies are interested in the display advertising channel (this one is interesting because online display ads have been on the decline in recent years). And the second bit of information is that Facebook is in a very close third place in the online display ad race.
All of this is really good news for advertisers. The competition means that you have choices, and it also spells lower advertising rates as the companies compete for your dollars.
If online display advertising is something you’ve been considering for your business, now might be the time to get in.
Tags: Display Advertising, google, online display advertising, yahoo
Posted in Display Advertising | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
If you are involved in any link building efforts at all – and you should be – then you’ll have to keep track of where you put your links and which ones are tracked by the search engines. I recommend a simple Excel spreadsheet for the former – or you could buy a bit of software that does it for you (if you really want to spend the money). But for keeping track of what the search engines consider inbound links, you have two options.
- You can buy a program that monitors each search engine’s link count (which won’t be 100% accurate – especially for Bing and Google)
- Or you can use a free link checker
There are link checkers online that are free. Of course, the free ones are no better at accurately counting the inbound links from Google and Bing than the paid ones are. That’s because these two search engines don’t report all their links. They prefer to keep that information secret.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, has always been open about letting website owners (and the whole world) know what it considers to be a good inbound link. You can find that information through Yahoo!s Site Explorer.
Site Explorer is free and allows you to get more than just inbound link information about your websites. And you can use it to explore link opportunities for your websites. It’s one of the world’s most valuable free tools.
Tags: bing, google, inbound links, link building, link checker, yahoo, Yahoo! Site Explorer
Posted in link building | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
Yesterday, the Internet’s largest has been – Yahoo! – sold Delicious. But unless you’ve heard the news, you might not guess who the buyers were. Do the names Chad Hurley and Steve Chen mean anything? No? How about YouTube?
Mssrs. Hurley and Chen are co-founders of YouTube, which they sold to Google awhile back. So I suppose they had the money to buy the struggling social bookmarking website.
Delicious is one of the early forerunners of social bookmarking. You would think that it would have a lot more clout today because of its early start status. And it might have had it not been purchased by Yahoo! a long, long time ago.
The question is, can these two successful entrepreneurs take Delicious and turn it into a superstar? They’ve already been a big part of two other Internet companies that achieved superstar status – PayPal and YouTube. That at least gives me a little bit of confidence in the future of Delicious. I was afraid that it might get shut down.
Yahoo! sent out an e-mail to Delicious members asking for their permission to transfer bookmarks to AVOS, Mssrs. Hurley’s and Chen’s new venture. Users of Delicious have until July 2011 to accept AVOSs terms of service and to transfer their bookmarks. Its current life will expire at that time and the new Delicious will be born. Are you as excited about this news as I am?
Tags: Delicious, social bookmarking, yahoo
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
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