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When Yahoo! makes news these days, it’s usually not good news. But today there’s a bright spot for the portal, which has managed to capture the No. 1 spot for internet news, ahead of rival Google.

According to comScore, Yahoo reaches 50 million people per month between its news, finance and sports channels. Although TV still has a greater daily reach, portals like MSN, AOL and Yahoo are quickly becoming news heavyweights.

Scott Moore, vice president of news and information, told Forbes.com that Yahoo has built its news empire by cutting deals with an array of news providers.

“Our news product is very leanly staffed,” Moore said. “The MSNBC news room has 150 to 200 people. Yahoo News is a fraction of that. We have lower costs and that makes us more profitable.”

Despite the popularity of the news division, Yahoo executives continue to look for a solution to the company’s struggles.

Last week, Yahoo unveiled its next-generation search, which it hopes will rival Google’s universal search. In the meantime, Yahoo engineers continue to test Mash, a social network built to replace Yahoo 360. The company hopes Mash could find itself wedged between MySpace and Facebook for a share of the growing social networking market.

Source: http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/16927.asp

A MSN/Yahoo deal doesn’t make much sense. Google and Yahoo makes more sense, although that wouldn’t be ideal for search marketers, as that would not leave us with much leverage.

“We’re going to claim ownership of this idea: that the right partner for Yahoo isn’t Microsoft, but Google. A JP Morgan analyst, cited in Barron’s, estimates that Google’s more liquid exchange for text ads, if brought to bear on Yahoo’s search results, could add more than $1bn to the Sunnyvale internet company’s 2008 earnings. That would create more value than any other possible deal for Terry Semel’s lumbering internet portal.

Barron’s Eric Savitz thinks the deal could get past the anti-trust authorities, because a combination of the two biggest internet media companies would still have only 4% of the US advertising market, if one includes both online and traditional media.

Valleywag’s idea, first floated in January: just do a long-term deal to bring in Yahoo’s search engine as an affiliate of Google’s Adwords search marketing business, which would be less obviously monopolistic, as well as less convoluted; and do a deal soon, before the government wakes up to the fact that Google will soon be way more powerful than Microsoft.“

The world’s biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos via e-mail.

Microsoft has a 2 gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.

“We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. “You can keep stuff forever.”

Officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.

By contrast, when Yahoo first introduced its e-mail service a little under a decade ago, it capped individual storage at 4 megabytes per user. At that time, an “ultra high-density” floppy disk for personal computers then held 144 megabytes.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” said Filo, who remains active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California, company and carries the honorific title of Chief Yahoo.

Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

“We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average,” Kremer said by phone. “What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos.”

One caveat Yahoo makes is that the offer is for personal use and subject to guidelines against abuse that apply to Yahoo Mail. No one can build a business giving away unlimited storage to other consumers using Yahoo Mail, executives said.

Two countries — China and Japan — are excluded. “We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans,” Kremer said in a statement. Yahoo is a minority owner with partner Softbank in Yahoo Japan Corp. and a part owner with Alibaba of the Yahoo business in China.

Filo said Yahoo is looking at lifting caps on storage for other services such as its Flickr photo-sharing service. “We are looking at those on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

It’s a far cry from when giving away 2 megabytes of data was considered a big deal, said David Nakayama, Yahoo’s group vice president of engineering and developer of RocketMail, which Yahoo acquired and relaunched as Yahoo Mail in 1997.

In a posting to Yahoo’s corporate blog, he said capacity when Yahoo Mail started was 200 gigabytes for all customers.

“I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2 megabyte quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4 megabyte per account!” he wrote.
Source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070328/tc_nm/yahoo_mail_dc;_ylt=AiYC.O2z69SNZBYnkcXXCPkjtBAF

As previously announced, Yahoo launched its Project Panama ad-ranking platform in the United States in an effort to compete with Google. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said the project would be constantly evolving based on user feedback. When users use Yahoo’s search engine, the system uses quality and key-word bid prices to match ads with the results and effectively converts user searches to advertising revenues. Yahoo executives have said the overhauled ad-ranking platform will be a main source of income needed to host the many free online services the company provides to hundreds of millions of Yahoo website visitors around the world.

“The launch of this new ranking model marks a key step in Yahoo’s broader strategy to capitalize on the future growth of the Internet by leveraging our deep audience insights to create a full-fledged advertising network. This creates a win-win situation: by making it easier for users to find what they need and love, Yahoo can also deliver a more compelling offering for advertisers and publishers,” said Yahoo’s public relations director Gaude Lydia Paez.

News source: Physorg

It’s always easy in retrospect, of course.

Great article at Wired on how Yahoo blew the search race.

“Terry Semel was pissed. The Yahoo CEO had offered to buy Google for roughly $3 billion, but the young Internet search firm wasn’t interested“

Not only that, Yahoo had helped make Google a household name by using Google’s search results up until 2004. It’s gotta hurt.

“At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.�

Also interesting snippet from Rich Skrenta:

“Heck, I tried to buy Google for AOL in 1999. I had no authority, having only been at AOL 2 months after the acquisition of NewHoo. Dave Beckwith, VP of Search at Netscape and I visited Larry and Sergey in their Menlo Park garage headquarters. Dave was being cagey so I asked Larry flat out — how much? Larry’s reply: “You don’t understand. We don’t want to just get rich ourselves. We want to make our family and friends rich too.“

Yahoo SEO Article

Hi,
Before you read on, I wrote this article with many other articles in mind. This article is only concerned with Yahoo Search Engine. I have tried my best not to sound someone else in this article. But if you think I need changes please tell me. I’ll try to improve.

Please post you Reviews after you read my article. I love to see reviews about my work. OK Now read

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization”. It is the process of analyzing your potential design and problems for search engines indexing and positioning. In other words, making your web site and its content attractive, relevant and visible to search engines and web searchers.

There is nothing worse than having a beautiful web site with excellent written content, though you still lose traffic or you even keep potential visitors away, while your site cannot be found.

Yahoo! is the second biggest of the three major engines and includes an enormous network of websites. The algorithm is based on that of Inktomi which Yahoo! purchased back in 2002

Search Engines Guidelines for Webmasters
Yahoo! Search Site Guidelines http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

Url submission in Yahoo!
https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

The Factors

There are Various factors to rank well in Search Engines. For Yahoo! here are main areas:

Keyword
Site structure
Backlinks
Aging

Keyword Density

Keywords help the search engines crawl and index the ranking of pages. But an overdose of Keywords can ruin your site ranking or even get you banned. Keywords are ignition fuel if used ever can fire up your ranking. Before you find a search Keyword understand what you want to searching for. For example you have a Motorbike website and you want to promote it. It wont be wise enough to promote your site using the keyword like Motorbike website. There are already tons of site using that Keyword. Try to be more specific about it. Like you can use Keyword which are closely related to your site (Honda, Yamaha, MotoGP, or anything of that sort). Keyword ranking changes each month so search for the new keywords on a regular base. Compare them with the top ten for further analysis. You can find out more and search about Keywords through these tools:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://www.highrankings.com/wordtracker

Site Structure

Yahoo! takes site structure seriously than any other search engine. Its not that Yahoo! is the only search Engine concerned with site structure but good site structure is important for a various of reasons. Considering http://www.yahoofanclub.com an example of the site structure work. It’s a phpBB forum and a Mod rewrite has been done using rewrite mod from http://www.able2know.com Before the Mod usage there were only a few pages index in Yahoo. But after the Mod implementation a significant number of page got indexed. This mod changes the .php and seesions ids to .html type, which helps in SE friendly pages. There are various reasons in site structure. Main reasons are like good Content and Lower coding level. Good Content means that occurs higher up in the code of your page (not necessarily in your browser) is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code. Second, a properly structured site will be lower in code through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use, etc. The reduction in code will push the content higher up the page as far as a search engine is concerned and thus, it will be given more weight.
Here are Free SEO Desktop Tools for analysis of content and keywords:

* WebCEO http://www.webceo.com/
* Good Keywords http://www.goodkeywords.com/

Backlinks

Backlinks are a solid backbone of every website that wants to rank well in Search Engines. Anchored Text also helps in backlinks. Anchor text can be anywhere like in the forums, on the websites, guestbooks. Backlink aspects counts when optimizing your website for Yahoo!:

Quality Link: Now what does a Quality link means ?? It means the position and ranking of the link. There are many sites which rank well in Yahoo. Its just that you’ll have to find some of them. How to find them ?? Search your Key Phrase in Yahoo and you’ll end up with many site. Try to find the site which perfectly matches your criteria. Links from a trusted domain name like .gov or .edu and also domain name which are old enough ( 3 to 4 years) with good backlinks in Search Engines surely help in Yahoo.

Link Position: Link position is an important aspect in search engines. Link with a long list of other lists wont get you much. That’s why Link exchange with individual sites weighs more than directory listing. I have heard people saying that a link in the footer is of lesser ranking than a Header link. But according to me its myth. A site wide link is what I say is better. Sitewide link exchange means to have a link on every page. For example in the footer of a forum.

Anchor text: The linkage text is known as the anchor text. For example Yahoo forum will promote the words Yahoo Forum. Search Engines differentiate anchor text from directory listing text. Directory Listing style is link with a description below itself.

Non-reciprocal or One-Way links: - One Way links have more advantage over the reciprocal links. A big list of one way links can improve the ranking on Yahoo!.

Age Factor

Age Factor is yet another factor that matters in Search Engine Ranking. With the new sites getting launched each day search engines crawling them out. But still these sites do not rank well in front of the old giants. This happens because Search Engines. Yahoo sometime takes a month or 2 before heavy crawling. But its not that new site should not expect anything. Yahoo is the friend of New sites. Yahoo updates its index regularly. And new sites get index (though not heavily) faster than google. So, we can say that older the domain name the better it helps in ranking. Its better to start with an old name than a new one. You can search old domains through http://www.sedo.com or http://whois.sc

Directory listing:
Directory submission is always helpful. It shows your backlinks in the Search Engines. Directory submissions never mean that you’ll earn traffic from there. It only helps in increase of backlinks. Here are fews links complied to form a big list of directories.

http://www.yahoofanclub.com/about416.html
http://www.yahoofanclub.com/about337.html
http://www.yahoofanclub.com/about414.html

Some Helpful links:

Yahoo! Press Room - Read the latest press releases from Yahoo!. This may not give you the algorithm but it will tell you the direction they’re going. Understand this and you’ll be better equipped to deal with changes down the road.

www.Yahoofanclub.com Forum - Read the discussions on the yahoofanclub forums. A great way to keep updated but beware, not everyone in there is a qualified opinion.

SEO Toolkit 21 part guide to getting a top-10 listing on Google and Yahoo http://www.rlrouse.com/SEO.html

What if a Google home page looked a little bit more like a Yahoo home page.

I quite like it.

Although the “no, we’re not a portal� line would be difficult to say with a straight face.

Jeremy Zawodny: “I’m not sure if this is stupidity, laziness, or a mix of both, but check this out�

Holy duplicate penalty, Batman! It would appear that Google have been *cough* influenced by Yahoo! in a rather direct, and some may say “dark-side-of-the-force� kinda way.
The comments are very interesting.

It is possible, of course, that there is some plausable explaination, so we’ll wait to hear it. Then again, we may hear nothing at all.

Round #1: Jeremy outs Google over evil web design issues.

Round #2: Matt outs Yahoo over evil web design issues.

What will happen in round #3?

Hopefully they’ll start outing each others algos…