Forum Moderators: open
I've begun to see the latest Yahoo change as a good move for them. This article proved it for me: [news.com.com...]
Like other people have said, this means more people will pay Overture, so they make more money. Users get good, relevant, often NON-COMMERCIAL google results, which means they'll keep coming back to Yahoo and stop going to Google after a few uses. So they'll RETAIN the users because Yahoo offers other advantages such as email, stocks, etc. This means they get more in advertising, plus, again OVERTURE. They may choose to add results from Fast, Inktomi, Teoma, or another PFI engine, which might give them more money because they'll probably get paid for this. These results could be downplayed so they don't affect the quality of the SERP's, but enought to provide another revenue stream. They won't have to spend as much money paying editors, computers, techies, etc - whatever it costs to run a directory, which must not be cheap. Thus they have more money, pay out less money, keep people on the site to sell other products.
At what expense? Bix Express submissions. Yes, this is a good revenue stream, but maybe they decided that in the long run it wasn't worth it, especially because of the quality of the results - let's face it, the directory was getting really crappy thanks to us SEO's :)
So now that I feel I have a grip on this, the obvious question - what now?
I'm not going to hope this changes or goes away, instead I'm going to try and work with what we've got. I think they've spent MONTHS and MONTHS testing this, that's why people kept posting about seeing different results. I doubt they're going to switch this any time soon. So I'm going think this is relatively permanent, or at least for the next 5-6 months.
The primary advantage of these new listings is DEPTH - kudos to those that've been working on developing content - this is the real payback. Before, Yahoo was benefitting "Mini Sites", sites created & optimized for one primary keyword. Now, this strategy isn't quite as effective, because Google isn't giving quite so much a boost to these anymore.
Thus the latest strategy for me is one that many people have been advicing and I never cared to follow because I was doing great in Yahoo - create many pages to the sites, each optimized for different keywords. I believe that people that haven't seen a decline in traffic for Yahoo are the ones that have a lot of content and have good rankings for a wide variety of keywords.
So how to do this if you run affiliate sites or just don't have much content to offer?
1. Find the content - find the targeted keywords - create sections of the site with these keywords - put them out of sight from the user that is in the "main section" of your site. So you'll effectively create 2 section - one for engines, one for buyers. Thus fulfilling the goal of getting traffic PLUS conversions.
2. Diversify - instead of thinking you can hit it big with one keyword or product, it's time to find a variety of products/businesses to work with.
A lot of this post is targeted for people who do affiliate marketing. Mini sites aren't doing so well anymore. We don't have much content. Our sites have to be sales oriented. In the past there was no way because we could only rank 1 site for each keyword in Yahoo. However, now I can focus on fewer sites with more content. Not a bad trade off.
Sorry if this is too long and boring, I don't usually go on this much. Just wanted to share my thoughts & perspective.
