Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Yahoo Search Engine’ Category

Business Week is reporting that Yahoo is going to announce some kind of new blog seach.

Look for Yahoo! to unveil a response to Google’s blog search early next week. This from Bradley Horowitz, director of tech development in the company’s search group. He wouldn’t provide details in advance. And it could be that Yahoo’s announcement will cover only one aspect of blog or RSS search, and not the comprehensive release the search industry’s waiting for.

Yahoo’s announcement comes less than a month after Google’s release of its much antipated blog search. The Google engine, while fast and competent, has drawn few raves.

Yahoo has come up with something new called "Instant Search" and here are the details from the Yahoo Blog:

sometimes there is one really good answer to your search. And that’s what led us to develop Instant Search, which went into beta today on our next.yahoo.com site. As you type your search into the Instant Search box, it checks to see if there is a single, relevant answer for your query. If there is, that single result instantly appears on the page, just below the search box in a kind of "speech bubble". You don’t even have to hit the Search button or the Enter key, and you don’t have to sort through pages of results (though of course that option is still available to you).

Yahoo Local has expanded with new city and neighborhood pages, along with increased display of maps and use of community reviews.

Yahoo features custom pages for major cities throughout the US, as listed here, with areas of those cities broken down into individual neighborhoods. In addition, it has coverage of all cities throughout the US offering information in various ways.

Its important that your law firm is listed in the Yahoo local listings, as well as the normal Yahoo search listings.

Search Engine Watch has a post about penalties imposed at Yahoo and Msn for spam like activities, which can get your web site banned. I personally dont think Yahoo or MSN is doing enough because I see spam like sites all the time in those seach indexes.

In Yahoo’s guidelines pages for webmasters, the following is considered spam:

• 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
• Lots of pages that were 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

The bottom line is that you should never do anything that any of the search engines might consider spam. You really don’t have to because as long as your site is search engine friendly and optimized, has good content and has links from other related sites, then you should be able to get good listings for your legal site.

Yahoo’s Search Marketing, formerly Overture Services, announced the launch of its "Think Big" contest, which will award one small business with 10 million free ad impressions across the Yahoo! network.

Sir Richard Branson, world renowned entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group, will serve as the official contest judge and will hand select the winning company based on its business plan and proven ability to "think big."

Yahoo! Search Marketing will accept contest entries between April 28 and May 20 online at http://thinkbig.yahoo.com. Rules for contest eligibility are also available at the contest website.

Yahoo! did not give an estimated value of the prize, but given the minimum PPC fee of $.10 per click through Yahoo! Search Marketing, the minimum value would be $1,000,000.

Thats a LOT of clicks but I personally would rather just take the cash!

Chris Sherman explains how Yahoo is not standing still with their My Yahoo personal search features.

I personally use My Yahoo and really like it because it allows me keep track of many different things on one page and now these new features add even more value.

I can’t say the same thing about the Yahoo search engine though, I just don’t think its keeping up with Google as far as the amount of traffic it produces. It has a long way to go before it ever catches Google in my opinion.  Google not only produces more traffic but they also seem to have a much better handle on how they index sites.

Story from CNET about Overture changing its name to "Yahoo Search Marketing".

The portal giant on Monday shed its Overture Services brand and renamed the unit Yahoo Search Marketing. The replacement of the Overture brand will take place in the U.S. market initially, the company said. Other international markets will be re-branded later, but the Overture brand will be maintained in Japan and Korea.

The change comes nearly two years after Yahoo’s purchase of Overture, a pioneer in the commercial search business. The acquisition was meant to bolster Yahoo’s marketing efforts and its position against rivals Google and Microsoft.

I remember when Overture was GOTO.com, which really wasnt that long ago. I still hear people referring to it as Goto.  I do like how they changed the name close to my sites name of Legal Search Marketing though!

Report from the Yahoo Blog that Yahoo Search has updated the search index and that they will update people and provide an algorithm "weather report" in the future.  Which is something  that search engine legend Danny Sullivan requested awhile back.  From the Yahoo blog….

So consider this our first weather report. We’re releasing a new index tonight. You should see a lot of new content in the index as well as fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

Good to see Yahoo responding to the requests of the search engine community.  I have noticed a change in the Yahoo rankings and the overall listings seem to be improved.  I had noticed that a lot of spam like sites where starting to pop up, hopefully this new update removes those sites.    

I cant say that Ive noticed that much traffic from Yahoo though, it seems to have dropped if anything.  Still I love Yahoo and feel its a strong search engine and better then ever!

CBS News online has a story about the ongoing battle between Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo Inc. is quadrupling the amount of storage provided with its free e-mail accounts and upgrading its desktop search software in its ongoing duel with rivals Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo said late Tuesday that it will provide 1 gigabyte of storage for each free e-mail account. The current limit is 250 megabytes.  As part of its e-mail changes, Yahoo also is providing software from Symantec Corp. to clean viruses detected in attachments.