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Yahoo Adds New Real-Time Search Features

As a web developer, it is your job primarily to identify your target market and direct them to your websites. Directing traffic is the main point why we do search engine optimization in the first place.

Yahoo Adds New Real-Time Search Features

Real-time search engine results have been a major development in the industry today. Recently, Yahoo! announced that its SERPs will be run with near real-time information. The search suggestion feature is the tool that does this as it gives users the current trends with regards to their searches. Users can then deem if any of the suggestions fit what they are looking for.

This setup, though, has its share of disadvantages. One of the major setbacks to this is the fact that you can actually lose a significant amount of your traffic because of this real-time suggestion feature. While it is great that users have an easier time in their searches, keywords are still the main weapon of web developers. Its quite alarming when one is doing great with a set of keywords then having Yahoo!s suggestion features come in and display other sites. You can either gain a substantial amount of traffic or lose the same all in a moment.

Yahoo! states that the real-time feature will be based on whatever is trending in the search world at that moment in relation to the words/phrases being searched for. They added that real-time news and events are also included in the result pages. With info being updated every second, this can give your traffic a bit of a stumbling block unless you learn how to take advantage of it.

One thing you can do is to diversify. This means taking advantage of not only one money keyword but several of them. There are plenty of tools you can use to be able to pull this trick. You can maintain your top ranking in Yahoo! and in other search engines by being always on the lookout for updates " including ones shown by Yahoo!s real-time feature.

Yahoo Asks Advertisers To Make MSFT Transition

Advertisers with Yahoo Search Marketing accounts can - and should - start thinking about making a transition to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter. Yesterday, Yahoo made it possible for advertisers to take the first steps, and the company would like for everything to be wrapped up by the end of October.

Yahoo Asks Advertisers To Make MSFT Transition

There's a Transition Checklist and Feature Comparison Guide worth checking out in advance of changing anything. Otherwise, a post on the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog outlined the first pair of moves that advertisers can now make.
Here's phase one: "When you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account, you'll automatically be taken to a new tab labeled 'adCenter.' We recommend that you review your Compatibility Report, and fix incompatibilities between your current Yahoo! campaigns and the adCenter platform before starting the transition to adCenter."

Stage two is a little more involved. "When you begin your transition, you'll be able to create a new adCenter account, or indicate that you have an existing adCenter account that you want to continue to use. If you choose, you can use the transition tool to copy your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns over to adCenter. Please note that your campaigns will retain the same status (active or paused) . . . so you may start incurring click charges for Bing traffic right away."

Encouragingly, though, no one seems to have encountered any other problems so far.

As for the last step in the transition process, it's supposed to take place in mid-October, meaning advertisers can relax for a little while after taking care of these initial tasks.

Google Acquires Another Social Property

A search giant's move into social media appeared to continue yesterday with the acquisition of SocialDeck. Google paid an undisclosed amount for the company, which specializes in social games and the mobile experience.

Google Acquires Another Social Property

Not a lot of other details are available. Even the official announcement just amounted to seven sentences on the SocialDeck homepage (two of which were quite short: "Big news!" and "Happy Shaking!").

SocialDeck did see over one million downloads of its titles occur in 2009, however, which is somewhat impressive, and the company's been covered by the Canadian Press, Forbes, and USA Today.

Plus, in the USA Today article, a SocialDeck fan pretty much compared one of its games to an addictive drug, indicating that she plays it before climbing out of bed and gets "feelings of withdrawal" after a day off.

So Google seems to have picked up a successful company. That should increase the odds of whatever sort of social network it pieces together competing successfully with Facebook, even if Facebook has a huge lead in terms of users and mindshare.

Of course, Google's search dominance should also be a major asset, allowing it to promote its social network in a very prominent spot.

Google Testing Real Time Search Results

The internet world is buzzing with excitement over the latest Google news! Reportedly, Google is testing a new feature which keeps updating the result page in real time for your search as you type your search query.

Google Testing Real Time Search Results

This new feature was first spotted by UK SEO consultant, Rob Ousbey and Google's Ambar Pansari and Marissa Mayer confirmed the feature in a post of the Official Google Blog. They also mentioned that the feature is still in the testing stage with a select group of people.

The reason behind this new feature is that Google believes live search results will be better than having to continually narrow down the search terms on a standard Google search. Also, this will help Google learn more about how people build up their search path to find the pages most relevant to them.

Check out the video below for an example of how the real-time search results feature works:

Also, Google has now taken is real-time search feature to a new level by rolling out a standalone site for real-time searches.

The site google.com/realtime will pull news stories, blog posts, and updates from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz for your particular search query.

While Google's real-time search has been available in its core search for a while now, this stand alone site is even better. Google has added some customization features, like the ability to drill down by location or time or even updates with images.

While, I like the new real-time search site, I am not sold on "search as you type". I think this will get pretty annoying as you try to get a definitive set of search results. What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

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Google Changes Ranking Algorithm Again

Google has again changed its ranking algorithm which is expected to make quiet an impact on the search engine results pages (SERPs). The latest change is expected to cause a major shuffle in the SERPs for queries strongly linked to content from a particular domain.

Google Changes Ranking Algorithm Again

According to Google software engineer Samarth Keshava, the new ranking algorithm will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, well now show more results from the relevant site.

Change in the ranking algorithm will increase the number of results making it much convenient for users to find more relevant content.

This new change is in sharp contrast to Googles previous algorithm that did not allow more than 2 or 3 links/pages from the same domain " so that clients could see an assorted set of links on the first page of SERPs. But now more than 6 or 7 links/pages will be shown from the same domain.

Here is an example:

As a result of this change, webmasters and SEO consultants are probably going to have to change their strategies and make sure they push up the relevant pages from a domain containing popular keywords.

Why is this good news for your Google reputation management?
Managing the top ten Google search results for your company has just become easier. Now you get 6 pages from your own site in the results, whilst pushing down the pages with negative articles/reviews about your company. Plus you also get to push down any competitors who might also feature in your top results.

Is Google showing more than 2 listings for your company? Feel free to let us know below.

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Yahoo! Search Now 'Powered by Bing'

Yahoo! has officially begun the transition of their back-end technology to Bing to power its searches for their US and Canada based clients. Shashi Seth (Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products) officially announced the news on the YSearch Blog:

Yahoo! Search Now 'Powered by Bing'

Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both web and mobile searches. Keep an eye out for the "Powered by Bing" indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft. And of course, as we've stated before, you'll continue to enjoy the same enhanced Yahoo! experience that surrounds the listings themselves " such as rich results, Search Assist suggestions, site filters, related topic suggestions, and more to come.

The deal agreed upon by Microsoft and Yahoo!, to combine on search and ads in order to combat Google, now includes all Yahoo! searches in the two countries now sporting the 'Powered by Bing" logo at the bottom of the search page.

Yahoo! announced that the initial step of a shift from an in-house search system to Bing's platform is complete and that its web, image, and video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now being served up by Bing. Meanwhile, Microsoft has noted that the new search results are only available to Yahoo's english search results in the US and Canada. Other languages will come in the coming weeks.

Microsoft's full back-end global support to Yahoo! is expected to come in 2012; when it will become essential for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center. The Bing tool will control site, webpage and feed submissions. While the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool will shift to focus on new aspects for webmasters that provide better analysis of the organic search traffic one gets from the Yahoo! network and their partner sites.

Have you noticed that your Yahoo! search results are now 'powered by Bing'?

Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

Yet another change on Google, and this time Google has tweaked its ranking algorithm so to allow, a large number of results from a single site on a single page. According to Google, this improvement is essentially for users to find better and deeper results from a single site.

Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

"Today we've launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain" said Google.

Earlier, only two results showed up for a query on a particular brand, but now there would be 7-8 results for that query on a single page with last few from other sites, to have some diversity in the results. A spokesperson from Google said "We periodically reassess our ranking and UI choices, and today we made a change to allow a larger number of pages from the same site to appear for a given query. This happens for searches that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain."

The change will certainly be beneficial for those with reputation management issues.

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Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

Google's Search Adds Single Page Domain Results

Yahoo! Linkdomain Search Changes For Webmasters

As a search engine optimization professional, one of the tools that I got in the habit of using over the past several years has been the un-publicized feature called link domain. For years, even though Google eventually turned off the link query at their search engine and made it available to site owners only, and Bing.com eventually turned it off also, Yahoo!...

Linkdomain Search Changes For Webmasters

...always allowed us to use the linkdomain query at Yahoo.com. The query looked liked this:

This query would show you the links to a domain name (including all of the subdomains like www.domain.com, blog.domain.com, etc. etc.). And including -site:domain.com you could exclude certain sites (like the domain linking to itself). You could include even more than one domain in the -site:domain.com, so that you could narrow down the links even further. Thats was especially nice if you wanted to exclude certain links from an entire domain if the domain had a lot of links from one particular domain name.

But just recently, Yahoo! search has just started redirecting the linkdomain search query results to Yahoo Site Explorer. And, the linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com search no longer exists. I guess we can chalk this up to one more casualty of the Bing.com/Yahoo.com search alliance that I personally dont like.

Although the query is being redirected to the Yahoo Site Explorer, the ability to disallow more than one domain name in the query (by adding a -site:domain1.com -site:domain2.com, etc. to the query) is something that we are no longer going to be able to do.

So, most likely, as webmasters and as search engine optimization professionals, we are left to find other ways to monitor our competitors and look for links.

To learn more about what Yahoo is up to, take a look at their recent blog post about important API changes and changes to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

At Bing.com, you might want to use the linkfromdomain query but it doesnt work the same as the linkdomain search at Yahoo.com did.

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