'Net Features : yahoo!

Do Not Track Arriving at Yahoo!

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Yahoo! is one of the first large Internet companies promising to honor the browser-based do-not-track headers.

The company announced last week that it will stop delivering ads and content to consumers that activate browser-based do-not-track features and will not create marketing profiles of those users.

Yahoo’s DNT solution has been in development since last year and, according to Yahoo, is implemented in-line with Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) guidelines for the use of online behavioral advertising (also called “Interest-based” advertising) and multi-site data.

Do-not-track is particuarly challenging for companies like Yahoo! as not only is it a first-party publisher, but it also acts as a third-party ad network through its ad companies Right Media and Interclick. Yahoo!'s announcement comes the same week as the Federal Trade Commission released its final privacy report calling on ad networks to honor do-not-track requests.

How this will impact advertising costs and revenue for Yahoo! is unknown.

What is do-not-track?
Internet users with an up-to-date Web browser now have an option to set a do-not-track (DNT) preference in their browser. When the feature is activated, a signal is sent to servers collecting data.

When those services receive the DNT signal, it will activate Yahoo!'s opt-out process. According to the announcement, Yahoo will then no longer score activities for advertising or content interest and cease ad personalization and content personalization based on those interest scores.

Yahoo! & ABC News Form Information Alliance

Michael Garrity — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:35:00 GMT

In a huge announcement made early this morning, two global media powerhouses, Yahoo! and ABC News, revealed that they will be combining their journalistic forces. This unprecedented move could have major ramifications in the news and search industries, potentially forcing other major search engines to establish similar partnerships with news organizations.

Currently, the two companies reach a combined audience of over 100 million people in the United States on PCs and various mobile devices.

This interesting, multifaceted relationship should prove to be a boon for both organizations. Yahoo! will provide a huge, unique and new audience to ABC News, a well-respected and trusted news enterprise with decades of experience.

The biggest part of this "information alliance," in addition to providing far more people with far greater access to news, is that the companies will establish more original news videos online than ever before.

Today saw the launch of GoodMorningAmerica.com on Yahoo!, the official beginning of the partnership. Also debuting today will be the first of three new, online-first video series featuring some of ABC News' most popular anchors and correspondents. The new shows include Newsmakers, which presents online-first video conversations with top ABC anchors, like Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric or Barbara Walters, interviewing "everyone from politicians to global leaders to celebrities." Today's installment, which airs live at 2:35 p.m. ET, features George Stephanopoulos talking with President Obama. No big deal, right?

The two other new shows are Around the World with Christiane Amanpour, which spotlights the internationally-renowned host bringing her special background to light as she explains, contextualizes and analyzes the biggest stories around the world, and This Could Be Big, a show, hosted by Nightline anchor Bill Weir, about future innovations that could drastically alter the world. Other shows will debut in the coming months and throughout 2012.

A headline making announcement like this is bound to really change the way many people around the world get their news. For instance, ABC News will now be Yahoo! News' premier provider, which really alters the makeup of Yahoo! News for its millions of readers. Also, the aforementioned GoodMorningAmerica.com will exist as a co-branded site that offers a wide variety of video and news so that the huge audience of the GMA morning broadcast can engage with the content online before, during and after the show airs.

The two companies will also begin collaborating on news content and co-producing coverage for major events. There will be "integrated bureaus" in the cities of New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

And lest we forget that there is also money involved, the two enterprises will be creating a suite of premium online video advertising opportunities, as well as new enhanced sponsorships that will allow advertisers to benefit from the unique strengths of each sales organization.

Yahoo!'s recent struggles have been well-noted, so it should be interesting to see how this new partnership affects the company in this period of transition.

The two organizations promise to "deliver the latest breaking news, the biggest exclusives and award-winning investigative journalism from a powerful lineup of journalists -- all with the ability to extend across TV and online like never before."

Yahoo! Announces New Details of Alliance with Bing

Linc Wonham — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:30:00 GMT

Yahoo! updated its search blog today with the latest news regarding the Yahoo!-Microsoft search alliance, which begins later this week when Bing starts powering Yahoo’s organic search listings in the U.S. and Canada.

We recently posted Five Steps to Becoming Bing-ready as well as an in-depth look at Bing’s New Webmaster Tools to help make the transition go more smoothly for website owners. Today Yahoo! wrote that while webmasters should familiarize themselves with Bing's tools as quickly as possible, that they should continue to provide their site information to Yahoo! using Yahoo’s Site Explorer for the time being. The reason provided is that worldwide implementation of the search alliance will not be completed until early 2012, and Yahoo! search results in many parts of the world will continue to be powered by Yahoo! until that time.

To ensure that business owners and webmasters receive the highest quality traffic from search results powered by both engines throughout the transition, Yahoo! wrote that it will share all site information provided on Site Explorer with Microsoft. Yahoo! also announced its decision to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences on October 1. For developers who wish to retain their codes, the company asked that they export them by that date.

For continued updates, FAQs and to leave comments about the transition process, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

Five Steps to Becoming Bing-ready

Linc Wonham — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

E-commerce merchants have waited more than a year to find out how the Microsoft-Yahoo! search alliance will affect their search marketing efforts and their businesses overall. The answers are not all going to come right away but with the merger now upon us, the wait is essentially over. Yahoo! is slated to start serving organic search results from the Microsoft Bing engine next month, and the company’s paid search ads will be migrating to Microsoft’s adCenter shortly thereafter.

The new partnership is expected to command about 30 percent of the search market currently dominated by Google, and data indicates that this percentage of users will be statistically closer to purchase than Google’s much larger share. That’s more than enough reason for e-commerce merchants not to ignore this significant change in the search landscape, and we have put together a list of five things to do to ensure that your business is ready for the start of this new era.

1. Give your content a tuneup
Tired of hearing that content is king? The statement has never been truer than it is today, and it is only going to become more so in the days ahead. You do not have to give yours a complete overhaul, but the new alliance presents the perfect opportunity to fine tune your content for optimal usability, readability and value to consumers — which will give you better results on any search engine. If you haven’t yet explored any of the simple online video tools that are available, do so now. If you have only scratched the surface with your social media efforts, now is the time to dig deeper into those campaigns. Look at your site for any areas of neglect such as the company blog, press releases, product images, user reviews and backlinks, and build them back up with the best content you can create.

2. Get up to speed on adCenter
If you are not already doing so, you will definitely want to utilize Microsoft’s adCenter. Many merchants have passed over this valuable resource and rely on Google’s AdWords instead, but adCenter has actually proven to have better e-commerce demographics and a significantly better conversion rate. With the new alliance in place, adCenter will be the pay-per-click ad portal for all Microsoft and Yahoo! sites starting at the onset of the 2010 holiday shopping season, or in the beginning of 2011 at the latest.

3. Use Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing has an excellent set of tools that will not only be functional to merchants in their search marketing efforts, but will also help optimize their sites for the search engine. The summary tool provides webmasters with the most recent crawling data and other status about their sites, and checks the domain score and page score and the estimated number of indexed pages. There is a backlinks tool that generates a list of inbound links which can be downloaded for offline viewing and editing, and an outbound links tool that provides a similar list of URLs.

4. Update your sitemap
A lot of the talk specifically about the Bing algorithm has revolved around sitemaps. Some of the data suggests that Bing searches rely more heavily on sitemaps than Google searches do, so merchants should make sure that theirs are in good working order to be better optimized for the new search partners. Sitemaps are simply directories for search engines that allow them to collect information about a site, and they are generally XML (extensible markup language) files. The important thing to do is to make sure yours is updated with the latest information that will be relevant during a search for your business.

5. Explore new keywords
Traffic will continue to grow on Bing before it eventually reaches a plateau, which analysts predict will be around the 30-percent point of the search market share. The time for e-commerce merchants and search marketers to explore the new field is when it is still trending upwards. Already, we have heard that Bing users are more likely to click on ads than Google users, so merchants should experiment with new keywords in their adCenter ads and in their creative content to see what gets a response. Analyze the traffic you get from different terms now to help determine which words and campaigns will have the most success over the long term when the traffic numbers level out.

Yahoo! to Webmasters: Optimize for Bing Now

Linc Wonham — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Implementation of the search alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft is only weeks away now, two years after the two companies signed off on the deal. Yahoo! released an update to advertisers on Friday to announce that it will begin serving organic search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine starting in August or September.

The statement advised website owners to make sure that their sites are optimized for the Bing crawler “if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website.” It also indicated that Yahoo! hopes to migrate its paid search ads to Microsoft’s adCenter by the beginning of the 2010 holiday season, but that it may wait until the start of 2011 to take that action.

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have been posting updates on their search and advertising blogs to help facilitate the moves.

Yahoo! Upgrades Flickr and Launches a New Testing Service

Linc Wonham — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:00:00 GMT

The folks at Yahoo! have rolled out some interesting new features in the past few days.

Flickr, the photo-sharing site purchased by Yahoo! in 2005, has an impressively redesigned primary photo page that, among other things, highlights the location information that users can include with their photos. The images displayed on the main page have also been enlarged by 35 percent and can be separately viewed in a lightbox. The navigation controls have been improved so that users can flip through photos more quickly and seamlessly than before.

Yahoo! also unveiled a new website user testing service it calls Boomerang. The new service allows site owners and Webmasters to get an objective, end-user’s view of their sites and evaluate things such as performance of dynamic pages, user bandwidth, component load time and network latency. Boomerang is available for download now.

Yahoo! on the March With Targeted Adverts

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:39:00 GMT

Yahoo! will soon unveil a set of tools designed to help advertisers better target their online audiences.

The new services will include the ability to target graphical advertisements to users searching for particular terms in Yahoo!'s search engine index and customizing the offers in ads based on which websites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites in previous sessions.

Advertisers can also combine Yahoo!'s standard behavioral ad tools with data drawn from advertiser sites for highly-customized ad "retargeting". In an example shared by Yahoo!, people viewing a specific flight offer on an airline website can later be served an ad offer for the same flight when they return to pages on the Yahoo! network.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text advertisements next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on demographic factors like their age and gender. Advertisers will also be able to modify bids for different audience segments.

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Yahoo! Analytics Beats Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:17:00 GMT

According to research by analyst firm CMS Watch, Yahoo!'s Web Analytics service surpassed Google in several key categories in relation to use by enterprises. You might remember that Yahoo! acquired analytics vendor IndexTools back in early 2008.

CMS Watch released its 470-page Web Analytics Report 2009, which evaluates 20 web analytics platforms against 12 potential use-cases. Vendors reviewed include Bango, Coremetrics, GlanceGuide, Intellitracker, Lyris, Nedstat, Omniture, Unica, Visible Measures, and WebTrends, as well as Google and Yahoo!.

CMS Watch found that Yahoo! Web Analytics surpasses Google in several key areas, including:

Better access control options and simpler approach to multi-site analytics
Larger default monthly page-view limits (200MM vs. 5MM – unless you have an active AdWords campaign)
Access to traffic data: Both vendors retain the right to hold and use your web analytics data for their own purposes, but Yahoo! gives you the ability to export out your raw, unaggregated data
Longer historical availability of raw data

CMS Watch also found that Yahoo! Web Analytics had its drawbacks, including an administrative complexity that accompanied its functional richness, and present lack of 24/7 tech support. "Ultimately, for some enterprises, neither Google nor Yahoo! makes a good fit," explained CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, "and those customers should consider fee-based web analytics solutions."