Oban’s search news
November 20th, 2008
In this edition of Oban’s search market news, Mo focuses more on Yahoo and Google related issues.
Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang announced his resignation from the position, but he will stick around.
On November 17th Yahoo announced that Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, will be stepping down from his position once a suitable replacement is found. Of course, he will be working with other board members to find his successor. Yahoo has been on a rollercoaster since Yang took the CEO post. The highlights include Yang’s decision on Microsoft’s deal to buy yahoo that I covered to some extent in my previous post and the most recent Google/Yahoo partnership fallout. Yahoo’s stock reached a longtime low of $9.07 after the deal’s fallout. The stock value increased after Yang’s resignation announcement.
On another note, Microsoft announced that it is now open to a search-only partnership with Yahoo. It is worth mentioning that Steve Ballmer not long ago said that Microsoft is done with Yahoo. It seems like they were looking forward to Yang stepping down. Many believe that Yang should have made this decision long time ago, but one can only wait and see how this decision will affect Yahoo’s struggling stock value.
On a more positive announcement from Yahoo, US-based users are now able to use Yahoo “Glue Pages”. Glue Pages was a big hit in India, where it was launched for the first time. Glue Pages initially is a search result aggregator that pulls results from different sources such as: image search, blogs, Yahoo answers, news, Wikipedia and video.
There are some differences between the original Glue Pages and the version launched in the US; the most important of them is the search results! In the US version, the Yahoo search results are not presented in the page; there is instead a Yahoo search box in the upper right corner that will take the users to the main Yahoo search page. It is interesting to see that Yahoo, facing increasing criticism for under performing, is testing new ideas in bringing more structure to search results and innovations in user experience.
This concludes our Yahoo section and now here is Mo (again!) with Google news:
Google on Nov 12th released its SEO starter guide. The document comes as a 22 page PDF file that discusses different aspects of search engine optimization and is aimed at webmasters and site owners to help them with basic SEO training. The important topics covered by the document include (but not limited to):
• Page titles
• Heading tags (H1,H2,…)
• URL structure
• Anchor text
• Image optimization
• No-follow relationships
• And of course Google webmaster tools
In general, it is a good source for basic SEO advice. There are interesting comments on the Google’s blog post from both SEO professionals as well as site owners.
Google’s site search now offers on-demand indexing for the websites that implement this service as their on-site search tool. In my opinion, this is a major improvement to the service, here is why:
Previously when a webmaster that implemented this service updated the site content, s/he had to wait for the Googlebot to re-index the website again and as we all know this could take sometime (of course it differs from site to site but it never was immediate); whereas now the site owners can go into the configuration screen of the site search and request an indexing and a re-crawl will be done on the site and users will have access to all the new content using the site search.
It should be noted that this feature does not affect the indexing of the site in Google’s own search datacenters and the new content will only appear in Google’s search results once it has been indexed by the main Googlebot and added to the index.
Looking forward to reading your comments about the topics covered in this post and feel free to ask any SEO-related questions.
Happy searching
Mohammad Heidari Far
