SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

The past few months has seen Yahoo! in a spin when Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for the company. But they are now preparing to unleash their new company-saving ad system, which is said to become a one-stop shop for selling and buying ads across the Web.

Formerly known as “Amp,” … is seen as key to helping them meet growth projections and maintain independence… It will compete with Google’s DoubleClick, the dominant player in ad-management software.

Yahoo! said its system will make it easier for publishers, advertisers and agencies to buy and sell space while avoiding the hassle of picking up the phone. And unlike DoubleClick’s, Yahoo!’s will be free.

The initial feedback has been positive, but only time will tell if this will get Yahoo! moving ahead to where it needs to be. Read more about this on New York Post

Yahoo, in an attempt to win back market share from Google has decided to let independent web developers use the Yahoo technology to create their own custom searches.

This new service will be know as “Build Your Own Search” or BOSS, and will allow any third party developers to piggyback onto their technology. Yahoo in return will display their ads next to any search result, in an effort to combat Google Ads.

Yahoo figures plenty of Web developers will be interested because it’s providing access to a set of tools that would cost more than $300 million to build from scratch.

Whether this is a sign of innovation or desperation from the wounded giant of the search engine world is yet to be seen. Microsoft has attempted a takeover of Yahoo, with certain shareholders favouring the takeover due to plummeting share prices.

For more information on the technology and the takeover, check out the Forbes article.

Yahoo recently began offering a new type of search engine results pages (SERPs) to it’s users in India known as Glue Pages.  Along with the normal search results, Glue Pages also display a heap of other information related to the search. This information includes, features such as recipes, medical information, Wikipedia entries, stock charts, Flickr images, train schedules, restaurant lists, news, and even Google blog search results.  As well as leveraging Yahoo’s strengths of being more of a portal than Google, pages like this also present an array of monetisation opportunities for Yahoo, be it sponsored search results, display advertising, product listings and so on.

The pages were developed by Yahoo’s Indian team, as Yahoo encourages each of their teams to develop services that they feel will work well in their own markets. Beta testing is live on the Indian Yahoo pages, however at this stage there are no plans for launching the service on other Yahoo domains unless it really picks up and takes off during testing.

Yahoo has launched a new service called SearchScan that will indicate potentially harmful or risky sites right within the search results. The detection comes from McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology which scans sites for unruley issues such as spyware or malware downloads in order to help protect user’s computers. If a site is flagged as containing such issues a small red line of text below the title link for the site on the search results page will warn users of the potential problems detected in an effort to deter the user from proceeding to click through. (more…)

The Yahoo! using Google Ad’s deal is getting close sources say. It is believed the small trial of Google Ad’s has yielded positive results for the Yahoo! camp.

The anti-trust problems that would occur with a Yahoo! and Google combination are yet to be discussed, but would be very interesting if the powers that be would let it work out.

This deal is reported to be helping Yahoo! get away from the hostile Microsoft takeover that is getting closer.

IF Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, one would assume anti-trust problems would surely arise regardless as they both have similar interests and 2nd and 3rd market share positions in the game of search and online marketing.

Analysts state that Microsoft have a 99% chance that they will succeed in the acquisition / merger with Yahoo! a panel of Analysts have said.

The stand off has lasted 6 weeks since the world’s largest software maker went public about its proposal to purchase Yahoo! The pioneering search company originally rejected Microsoft’s offer, which was valued at $41.4 Billion, due to ’substantially undervalueing’ the company.

Yahoo! has released two new advertising formats for online video as well as announcing plans to offer overlay ads thanks to their recent acquisition of Maven Networks for US$160 million.

One of the new formats includes a clickable ad that displays a semi-transparent message on top of the video when a user moves their mouse over the area.  The text, which is available either before of after a video plays, prompts the user to click for more information launch a second window loading the advertisers landing page.  The second addition is a 3 second clip advert that plays before the clip loads.  After playing it will then display in a banner above the clip and if clicked will pause the video automatically and send the user to the advertisers landing page in a new browser window. Maven offers overlay ads that load on top of the video being played and can be inserted before during or after clips, as well as placed into live streams.

At this stage the new formats are available in the US only.

Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo! has donated $50Million USD for a green building at Stanford University, which will be called the ‘Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki’ Environment and Energy Building.

Donations such as this are talked of as signs of slowing down, potentially indicating Jerry Yang may be retiring soon.Jerry is flat out at the moment trying to stop the Microsoft takeover bid, but has still found time to promote his own legacy by naming a building at Stanford, very similar to that of what Bill Gates did for a reported $6 Million in 1996 to get a tech building named after him.

Yahoo, owners of Delicious for a little over 2 years now, has reportedly begun playing with the concept of showing information from the social bookmarking site under listings on its Search results pages.

Yahoo has confirmed that Delicious data has no impact on the search rankings, however from a user’s point of view a large number of “people who bookmarked” a page would indicate that it is a good resource and would theoretically attract a higher click through rate. I am sure Yahoo would be monitoring this sort of data. Furthermore, displaying the tags Delicious users have assigned to the links helps search users to investigate delicious bookmarks related to the topics they are researching.

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In, what I think to be, an excellent development, CNET reports that Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to bring pay-per-click adverts to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads contextually relevant to the content inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail. To be honest I am surprised it’s Yahoo and not Google making a move like this. (more…)