"Should We Expect The Same Service We get From MSN?"

That's the question we should all be asking ourselves in the coming months when it comes to Yahoo! and paid search.

Now, because I do paid search in-house, I didn't have an assigned Yahoo! rep until April. That's because 1). My predecessor had never asked them for one... And 2). We weren't quite yet spending enough. But I fixed the spending issue... And they finally gave me a rep, after asking for a few months.

But my rep resides in California, and I only have phone and email contact with him. No in-person attention. He also doesn't run reports or really help me out with optimization suggestions. I mostly just use him for account maintenance issues.

Now, MSN on the other hand, my rep there is a disaster. She's over worked. Under-fed. And an all-round bi-atch. And now with things in (somewhat) turmoil at Yahoo!, it's making me wonder if we can expect service from Yahoo! to turn to complete crap soon?

Thoughts?

Don't Hate Tha Playah, Hate Tha Game?

I've been holding off on bitching about this particular topic for a while. But I no longer want to keep it in. Time to release.

Yahoo! is a bitch of an engine.

Whew! Now that I have said it, I can go into more details.

The company I currently work for has been having some issues with Yahoo! search. Specifically, they see some of our website pages as SPAM. All other engines (including Google) are fine with how we have things set up. But for some reason, Yahoo! just does not like these pages.

The pages in question are static pages that feature deal listings provided by our advertisers. So the only real content on these pages are the details of the deal, and links off our site to our advertisers' sites.

Yahoo! says these are "doorway pages." They say we need to fix these in order to get back in their index. Even though these pages provide the Internet consumers with info they are looking for, Yahoo! says we are "SPAM" and have pretty much "86'd" us from their index. They are so serious about this SPAM issue, they even have forbidden us from participating in SSP.

So the way I saw it was that Yahoo! was trying to be very "pristine" with their quality guidelines. More pristine (read: anal retentive) than all the other engines. But you know what??? I was wrong.

Yahoo! isn't trying to be "pristine." They're just trying to make things difficult for any site that competes with one of their related products. In fact, there are quite a few gripes I have heard out their on the "intertubes" of other companies that are doing nothing wrong and are being penalized by Yahoo! From being able to run paid search ads in certain markets to organic indexing to display advertising, Yahoo! is going around and preventing competitors from showing up in their network.

Yahoo! must not be very confident in their products.

How do I know they are doing all of this? What was the thing that set me off? Well, it was this... Yahoo! is cloaking themselves

Keyword stuffing... Hidden text... I guess those are okay to do. But doorway pages (that really aren't doorway pages)? Those are bad.

Screw Yahoo! and their little game. I don't use their engine and damn way.

Make It Easy For You To Google Yourself.

I admit it. I Google myself all the time. Day or night. During meals. While at work.

It's a narcissistic thing. And I feel good when I do it and get what I need right away. But I can usually get what I need quickly, because my full name isn't that common.

But there are many women out there (and men) who can't get what they need right away when they Google themselves. I was reading online this morning and came across an article from last week about a woman who can't really find herself when she goes to the plugs into the great white box for a search.

Such a shame. Everyone should be able to get satisfaction when Googling themselves. This is why you should only have highly unique names. Names that no one else has. Therefore, I think I am going to officially change my name to "SEO Pirate."

I don't think anyone else has that name on their birth certificate.

"Microhoo" & "Yahcrosoft" Chatter.

PPC Ninja sent me a link to a forum where people are chatting about this potential deal... Here are some of the highlights from what I've read so far:

"That would be a bigger disaster than "New Coke.'"

"Maybe the new name would be microhoo?"

"I think there will be no name change, because with all the haters no one wants to associate with Microsoft."

"I was thinking that 'Microhooters' would get a lot more mileage in the marketing department."

"If they had the money to duplicate Yahoo, they would have done it already. Haven't you noticed how bad MSN sucks?" (Yes. Yes. I have.)

Yahoo! + MSN = A Piece Of Crap.

I'm sure everyone has heard about how MSN is thinking about buying Yahoo! again. And I"m sure everyone thinks this is a pretty crappy idea.

A colleague of mine just sent me a quote that pretty much sums up what I'm sure most of us are thinking...

"Here are two companies that are bad at the same thing," said Scott Kessler of Standard & Poor's. "With a merger, you get one company still bad at doing that same thing."

Now, to be fair... I don't think Yahoo! is bad at what they do. I just think they are confused about what it is they want to be and do.

And MSN? Well, they're just crap. They're gonna bring Yahoo!'s brand down if this merger goes through.

Google Vulnerable?

Maura Welch over at Boston.com has an interesting take on the Fast Company article 'Why is This Man Smiling?' which covers Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

You see, Jimbo is making some waves in the search industry as his Search Wikia has launched in an effort to create 'the search engine that changes everything'. His game plan is pretty interesting and I really do hope that his efforts succeed, but back to Maura's comments - does Jimbo's move into the search space really make Google vulnerable?

Wikipedia is wildly successful, but I'm not sure if that success translate into the ability to build a 'better' search engine. Yes some search results suck and you have to go back and try different keywords or keyword phrases, but I don't know of any user that hasn't been able to find what they were looking for through Google.

It appears that Wales will go with a tactic that hasn't fared very well in the past - that of real editors combing through SERPs to determine how relevant a listing truly is. DMOZ tried this, Yahoo tried this and it is just impossible to scale. For anyone that used DMOZ in the past, you know that the wait times for getting a site approved were ridiculous due to the volume of material the editors had to comb through.

'Wales envisions large numbers of real live people--the kind of fervent volunteer brigade that edits Wikipedia--intervening to improve on the machine-generated results that we're used to from Google"

I wish him luck, but I have reservations about the viability of the product.

*This post has been approved by the Search Zombie, let the brain eating commence

PageRank Update.

Looks like Google has rolled out another export of PageRank on the toolbar. More sites (at least in my professional industry) appear to have seen a drop of one point from before.

This update was expected relatively soon. There hadn't been a PR update in over three months.