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What is Yahoo's New "Site Match"?
Overture, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!, has launched a new paid inclusion program, called
Site Match, as the commercial component of CAP. Site Match allows commercial content providers to
effectively submit Web content, update it frequently, obtain additional targeted leads, and track
and optimize their performance.
How much does it cost to use Site Match? - Site Match subscribers pay an annual review fee, which breaks down as follows:
First URL: $49
URLs 2-10: $29 each
URLs 11-999: $10 each
Subscribers then pay a fixed cost-per-click for each customer lead that clicks on their listing.
For most content categories, the cost-per-click is $0.15 (Adult • Automotive • Books • Computers & Software • Dating
Education & Career • Entertainment & Attractions • Jewelry & Watches
Music & Video • Office • Other • Reference • Sports & Outdoors
Toys & Baby Equipment
), while select categories are priced at
$0.30 per click. (Apparel • Electronics • Financial Services • Flowers, Gifts & Registry
Health, Beauty & Personal Care • Home & Garden • Professional Services
Real Estate • Telecom & Web Services • Travel
)
The flat fee editorial review covers the cost to evaluate and judge the websites relevance
for inclusion into the Index. It also helps maintain the editorial quality of the Yahoo! Search
Index overall. The ongoing cost-per-click helps the program maintain quality support levels for
inclusion subscribers.
From Rich B.
What about those who just paid $299 / annually to get listed on Yahoo? - It looks
like you will still be listed on Yahoo until 4/15, but your ranking may slip after this date. We'll all just have to wait on this one!
Should I pay the $299 NOW? ... before the 4/15 cut off? - I would suggest not. Stay tuned to this web site for further details.
Yahoo Directory Inclusion gets you into Yahoo's Directory, but not their general Yahoo! Search index. With Yahoo Directory, you can only have one listing in a specific category of the Directory.
Is this "Site Match" any better than the PPC service that Overture already provides? - Good question! Overture does not currently
charge for an initial submission, but does have a "pay per click charge" that may be as low as $.10 per click (for non-popular keywords)
or $4.00 per click (for highly competitive words such as "flowers", "real estate", "clothing", etc.)
Site Match's early analysis seems to be a combination of flat fee pricing, PPC charges and page relavancy. If your site
has good content, it will still rank high in Yahoo, if you pay the submission fee and the "per click" fees.
Stay Tuned!
March
Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google - Google recently announced having reached 6 billion items indexed. The past three months have witnessed a serious shake-up in the way Google ranks pages. This is one of those cases where knowing the recent history will help you better understand the big-picture lending insight into how to map your ranking strategies.
Overture - We have good reason to believe there will be some major announcements in the very near future from the Yahoo/Overture/Fast/AltaVista group.
Inktomi - HUGE changes expected in paid inclusion services -
Yahoo recently changed from Google results to using their own search engine. This change has also affected the Search Submit services. This following notice was recently posted at Positiontech.com
IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT INKTOMI SEARCH SUBMIT - Yahoo! has transitioned to its own search technology and will soon launch a new inclusion program. As a bonus for current Search Submit customers, Yahoo! Search is providing a free trial of Yahoo! traffic that will end on April 15th, 2004. When the new inclusion program launches, new Search Submit subscriptions will no longer be accepted. Existing Search Submit customers will have the option of maintaining their subscriptions (receiving continued traffic from partners previously in the Inktomi network) or joining the new program for ongoing distribution on Yahoo! Search and a full network of portals.
AltaVista - We believe there will be some major announcements in the very near future from the Yahoo/Overture/Fast/AltaVista group.
Fast - We believe there will be some major announcements in the very near future from the Yahoo/Overture/Fast/AltaVista group.
Lycos - No major changes for Lycos.
MSN - No major changes for MSN.
ODP - No recent changes.
Yahoo - Finally, Yahoo has flipped the big switch on the wall and opted into their own search engine while discarding the Google search results. This is a change the SE industry has been anticipating for about six months now.
No doubt, Yahoo is going to be the engine to watch for a while. In several comments by company officials during February they've touted new personalization features soon to be added to their search engine. While we've yet to learn exactly what these new features will be, it sounds like Yahoo is going to take advantage of their large database amount of user information they've been compiling to help customize search results.
At this time, the most important piece of news is that Yahoo plans to operate Yahoo! Search as a separate engine and will be asking paid inclusion customers for more money in order to be listed in that index.
Web Mining Spider From
Web Mining Spider collects, stores and analyzes massive amounts of unstructured and semi-structured text. Webmasters or website owners can use this web application to gain insight about their company’s reputation and emerging marketplace issues to confidently develop competitive strategies. It searches internet data, weblogs, bulletin boards, enterprise data, legacy data, licensed content, newspapers, magazines and trade journals.
Note : Web Mining Spider is in beta stage and current version will not search all the resources stated above.
Displaying result may take 4 to 6 minutes or more. Wait for the page to scroll down for result.
Writing Great SEO Copy From
At yesterday's DMA/AIM net.marketing conference, session director Heather Lloyd Martin, president of SuccessWorks, offered some powerful words of wisdom regarding SEO copywriting. During her speech at the New York City-based conference, she advised you should consider rewriting your site copy if:
1. Your pages aren't converting or customers aren't clicking where you want them to.(And if you're rewriting with the search engines in mind, be sure to completely overhaul your copy so that you can maintain your marketing message.)
2. You have a page full of links. Links are not necessarily targetted for a search phrase, and they diffuse the impact a given page may have, especially if it's your landing page. We actually looked at this guy's furniture site during the session. The site's homepage had four sections targeting four different types of office furniture buyers, and each section had multiple links to various types of furniture on four separate domains. Bad idea! One domain with all the content is better than four separate domains. Putting everything on one domain allows you to keep all your PageRank concentrated on one site, too.
3. You have a page with no text. You don't of course, right? I didn't think so. This point was intended for the folks out there who are so image-focused, both in their marketing goals and front page content, that they forget to spell out what they do.
Some of the secrets of writing SEO copy.
First off, be sure to think of your product from the searcher's perspective. Go with key terms that searchers are searching for.
Now that you're thinking in terms of your searcher, be sure to use about 250 words of text. Heather called this the "search engine sweet spot." Every page should have 250 words, with 2-3 key phrases per page.
However, she warned, be sure that you never sacrifice your marketing message for conversion and flow.
And always, she concluded, write for the users, meaning use grammatically correct key phrases and correct spellings. Yes, even though people are searching for "wijits" if you spell widget like that you'll look like an ijit. It's all about your professional look and feel as well as the marketing message and conversion flow.
The Title is Vital. - She finished her presentation with a discussion of title tags. You know this by now if you've read WebProNews for more than a week or so, but just to reiterate: the title is VITAL.
Be sure to put your key phrase in the title tag of the page you are optimizing. The title must drive clicks: a compelling title can make up for lower placement on the search engine results pages!
If you only do one thing after you read this report, check out your titles and revise as needed.
YAHOO! to Exclude Inktomi Paid Inclusion From
Grehan, the author of Search Engine Marketing, wrote that after the 15th of April, Yahoo will "exclude Inktomi paid inclusion URLs from its main results."
This means that if you're getting Yahoo traffic now because of your paid inclusion with Inktomi, you won't after the 15th of April. You will still be listed everywhere Inktomi results are served - MSN and HotBot.
Over at PositionTech, where you can register for the soon to be excluded Inktomi, there's an announcement confirming Grehan's article that reads, "Yahoo! has transitioned to its own search technology and will soon launch a new inclusion program. As a bonus for current Search Submit customers, Yahoo! Search is providing a free trial of Yahoo! traffic that will end on April 15th, 2004."
YAHOO! Birth of a New Machine From
Yahoo is rolling out a brand new search engine today, with its own index and ranking mechanisms, casting aside its long-standing use of Google-powered search results. The move is bound to roil the industry and sets in motion a new race for the claim of web search champion.
In a surprising move, Yahoo isn't replacing Google with Inktomi. Rather, the company has developed a brand new search engine, drawing on the lessons learned from what the company calls the "critical mass" of search engineering talent that it has brought together through hiring and acquisitions, as well as investment in infrastructure and product quality.
Today's launch is the beginning of a progressive rollout that will take place over the next few weeks. It is also the beginning of numerous planned enhancements focusing on web search, personalization and vertical search.
It's important to note that the new search engine is for web results only. Image search is still powered by Google, and News search is still a combination of Yahoo's own editorial and technological resources.
For the entire article, go HERE!
YAHOO! & MSN Start to Change! From
Search engine marketers have long been awaiting changes at Yahoo and MSN. Finally, signs of transition are beginning to appear.
Yahoo has begun crawling the web with a new indexing robot -- foreshadowing some interesting potential developments as it gets ready to drop Google as its primary search partner.
The new robot is called Yahoo! Slurp, maintaining consistency with the Inktomi Slurp crawler, purchased by Yahoo more than a year ago. Although the crawler has many similarities to the Inktomi crawler, there are some interesting new features described on the help page for the robot.
One is that the crawler is collecting documents from the web to create a "searchable index for search services using the Yahoo! search engine. For months, speculation on various search engine forums has focused on Yahoo's presumed switch from the Google index to the Inktomi index.
But other features described on the help page suggest something more is afoot.
For example, although the crawler is functional (and if you have a web site, you can see its footprints in your logs), Yahoo says that crawled pages may not show up in search results. Why? According to the Yahoo Search FAQ, "The documents will be indexed and included into the search database in the near future."
Yahoo is also now creating a cache of web pages similar to Google's.
What else is changing at Yahoo? The company won't comment yet.
Meanwhile, over at MSN, LookSmart listings have been dropped, and Inktomi results have been promoted. MSN has also rolled out a new search beta. More details are available to Search Engine Watch members at the link below. We're tracking the new developments at Yahoo and MSN closely and will have full details in an upcoming SearchDay as soon as they're available.
For the entire article, go HERE!
"11 Signs of SPYWARE" From
1. You find a new hardware device connected between your keyboard and PC.
2. Your phone bill includes expensice 900 numbers that you never made.
3. You enter a search term in Internet Explorer's address bar and press enter to start the search. Instead of your usual search site, an unfamiliar site handles the search.
4. Your antispyware program stops working correctly.
5. A new item appears in your Favorites list without your putting it there.
6. Your system runs noticeably slower that it did before.
7. At a time when you are not doing anything online, the send or receive lights on your modem blink just a swidly as when you are downloading a file or surtfing the Web.
8. A search toolbar or other browser toolbar appears even though you didn't request it or install it.
9. You get pop-up advertisements when your browser is not running or when your system is not even connected to the Internet.
10. When you start your browser, the home page has changed to something undesirable.
11. Everything appears to be working normal. The most devious spyware doesn'y leave traces you'd notice, so scan your system anyway.
LavaSoft - Adware Removal Program! 
Ad-aware is a
free multi spyware removal utility, that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for
known spyware components and lets you remove them safely. Many options like scanning
depth or automatic modes can be set in the preferences menu.Ad-aware features an easy to
use wizard-style interface, guiding you through the scanning and removal process.
A detailed log file can be created automatically or manually after scanning.
The lastest "spyware" is a nasty item called SahAgent.exe that makes IE freak-out and not connect to ANY site. Others have stated, ... "It killed my Internet!". Go Here to read a valuable post about this NASTY worm! ... Install Ad-Aware and follow the directions from "Die Hard".
Parasites\Scumware systems detected by Ad-aware: - All versions of Adware, Alexa, Aureate, Comet Cursor, Cydoor, Doubleclick, DSSAgent, EverAd, eZula, Expedioware, Flyswat, OfferCompanion, Hotbar, OnFlow, TimeSink, Web3000, Webhancer, Transponder, Wnad, ZapSpot, SurfPlus, AdvertBar, NetPal, CashBar, WurldMediaBHO, MessageMates, EWA, Ezsearchbar, CommonName, GoHip, DownloadWare, NetworkEssentials, ImiServerIEPlugin, TopMoxie, Lop.Com, BDE Projector, UCmore, OpenMe, JaypeeSysBHo, FlashTrack, NetRadar, NetZany, many BrowserHijackers and more...
Spy Sweeper - Cleans Your System of Spyware!
Webroot Spy Sweeper is capable of identifying and eliminating certain
programs designed to collect information about you through your
computer use. Spyware is loosely defined as any program that covertly gathers
information through your Internet connection without your knowledge.
Once installed, spyware programs monitor user activity on the Internet
and transmit that information to interested parties.
In addition to wasting bandwidth, certain spyware programs can gather
information about email addresses, keystrokes, cookies, and
even passwords and credit card numbers. Many Spyware programs have been
known to cause system failure and general system instability.
Spyware types detected by Webroot Spy Sweeper
Adware - Software designed to track your buying and surfing habits
System Monitor Software - Software placed on your system, either
locally or remotely, for the sole purpose of collecting information
on all of your computer activities.
Trojan Horses - Malicious programs that masquerade as helpful
applications. Once installed, they collect and transmit information about
you. Hackers and identity thieves use Trojans to steal login names, passwords,
and credit card information.
Webroot Spy Sweeper has a FREE 30 day trial, w/ a yearly subscription = $29.95
LATEST / OTHER SPYWARE STOPPERS ... CLICK HERE!
Link Popularity, What is It?
Using Reciprocal Links or Link Exchanges, as a means of promoting your website, product, or service can be a very effective and inexpensive way to help your website grow and succeed online. Developing quality inbound links is critical for search engine rankings!
Being successful on the Internet means having people find your website and for people to find it, it has to be "visible" in the major search engines and directories. Building inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges is a simple yet very powerful website promotional tool. If done correctly, increasing your linkage will:
increase your traffic significantly
improve your visibility in the search engines by raising your link popularity
provide an added resource to your website
save you a lot of advertising money
Reciprocal Links: The mutual agreement between two web sites to display the other's link somewhere on their website. Also known as a link exchange.
Link Popularity: A measure of a website's on-line visibility through the number of the links pointing to it. This is the reason why link building or link campaigns are becoming so critical for webmasters.
Other Link Building articles
"Link Building for Top S.E. Placement"
Are You Popular? Why Does it Matter?
Build Links in 10 Steps
Link Popularity Checker!
More on Link Popularity!
131+ Link Building Strategies!
Reciprocal Links! Absolutely Important!
Reciprocal Links - Latest!
More on "Link Popularity"
Google Reciprocal Link Checker
What are Reciprocal Links?
"Is Google Web Search at Risk?" From
In its legal battle with Google Inc., American Blind and Wallpaper Factory Inc. is challenging much more than the search engine's keyword-based advertising practices. The home decorating retailer also is questioning Google's cherished search algorithms and Web index.
American Blind's lead attorney, in a recent interview with eWEEK.com, made it clear that the scope of the trademark infringement lawsuit filed last week against Google and the search engine's partners doesn't end with the sponsored listings for which advertisers bid on keywords. The retailer also is accusing Google of infringing on its trademarks by returning non-sponsored Web search listings from competitors when certain terms are queried, said David Rammelt of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, in Chicago.
... Google's main search listings come from its index of 3 billion Web pages and are ranked by its proprietary algorithms. Google also runs keyword-based paid search through its AdWords program. Those listings appear before or alongside the Web search results on its site and those of its partners.
... According to search engine experts, American Blind will find it more difficult to prove infringement by Google in its regular search listings. Those listings are, in a sense, based on Google's editorial judgment embodied in its algorithms and technology, something one might argue is covered by First Amendment protections, said Danny Sullivan, editor of search industry site SearchEngineWatch.com.
... Google has tried to avoid conflict with trademark holders, often barring competitors from bidding on keywords that match unique trademarks, as it has done for companies such as eBay Inc. and Dell Inc., Sullivan said. But conflict has become almost inevitable with descriptive terms, especially as search companies such as Google earn growing profits from search-based advertising.
"Anytime you bid on a word and understand that it's a trademark…you better feel confident that if you go to court you can defend the reasons for doing that," Sullivan said.
For the entire article, Click Here!
336-408-9075
Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
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