Yahoo

When you’re managing 30+ Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts, you tend to get a lot of administrative and marketing mail from them. Though I do my best to keep apprised of the latest changes in their service, there’s just too much information to care about all of the time. For example, they’ve been running a webinar series for making the most out of your campaigns, which, as PPC Hero cares to point out in good detail, can be a mixed bag of advice.

So why did my eyebrow raise to see that Yahoo will now offer me $20 as a thank-you gift for attending the webinar and then filling out the survey? A gift which I can get up to three times?

The reason I’m not attending these webinars is not because I need $20, but because my perception of time/value is just not there… and $20 sure isn’t changing anything. I even think their webinars are GREAT… for the right market.

For example, look at the titles of these:

How to Create Successful Campaigns
How to Create Successful Keywords and Ads
How to Improve your Ad Quality

All nice topics, covering some pretty hearty stuff like geo-targeting, automatic keyword insertion, landing page quality, and other factors that effect the success of a campaign. The problem is, I already know all this, which means that as many pieces as Yahoo sends my way, I’m still not going to be interested.

Missing the Boat

My frustration with Yahoo’s service, especially compared with Google’s, is their failure to provide powerful tools for account managers like myself. The topic of these webinars and the frequency of their appearing in my inbox is just more evidence of that.

Where’s my offline editor for managing multiple ad campaigns across several accounts?
Where’s my master account so I can easily review the status of multiple clients?
When can I pull reports for multiple accounts automatically, based on specified parameters?

While I appreciate Yahoo’s effort to keep customers apprised of how to make their campaign work for them, my feeling is that they’re doing so as the expense of professionals who need more than what you’ll get out of an hour-long slideshow.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all announced this morning that they’re supporting an addition to the Sitemaps protocol that makes it easier for site owners with multiple subdomains to manage sitemap files.

In the past, you were forced to maintain an XML sitemap in the same domain as the domain which it referred to. i.e. www.hallme.com would have a sitemap for this domain, and blog.hallme.com would also need its own sitemap hosted on its own domain. There was no way to specify that we wanted blog.hallme.com to have a sitemap hosted on www.hallme.com, nor could we for www.hallblog.com.

For most site owners, this isn’t much of an issue, but if your business consists of multiple web properties, or many subdomains, the management of the sitemaps protocol could be quite a chore! (Imagine a scalable CMS such as wordpress.com).

The update makes life a lot easier for webmasters in these situations. Now, you can host all of your sitemaps for multiple domains at a single domain, and then use your robots.txt file to point search engines to the location of the correct sitemap.

So let’s say we want www.masterdomain.com to have the sitemap for subdomain.masterdomain.com. All you need to do is add the following line to the robots.txt file on subdomain.masterdomain.com:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/subdomain.masterdomain.xml

On the same token, www.masterdomainblog.com could have this line added to the robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/masterdomainblog.xml

For the average small business, this is an interesting, if useless feature, but for businesses spanning multiple web properties, with subdomains, or for businesses like ourselves who manage sitemaps for hundreds of clients, the new update is welcome news indeed!

By now you’ve already hear that Microsoft has made an incredible bid of $45 billion to pick up Yahoo. Some call it an offer Yahoo can’t refuse, but what does it mean for your business online?

While in general monopolies have never proven to be great for the little guys, a combined Yahoo-Microsoft effort would either produce a viable competitor to the Goog or continue a tailspin of diminishing relevance, leaving Google the #1 search engine by default, not choice. With Google already enforcing strict policies about paid links and essentially defining how thousands of webmasters develop their sites, the latter situation would create a hazardous environment for business owners who have desires for their sites that at odds with Google’s policies.

Now to Google’s credit, their standards for websites are generally pretty good ones — build sites for users, avoid using duplicate content, have a reliable site, etc. However, what checks and balances will there be if the organic search world is a one-company show? Especially as Google stretches its fingers into acquiring information and media properties, the neutrality of this web behemoth is going to become ever more a subject of scrutiny… and legitimate concern.

On the other hand, even a more influential Google will have to contend with the emerging power of social networks, which is exactly where a Microsoft-Yahoo would be strong. The savvy website owner — that is, you — will be wise to keep working on a site which drives in diverse sources of traffic, and answers all of the questions your customers typically have. Though it’s also not a bad idea to make an appearance in social media circles!

Well all know that technology changes will abruptly alter how we approach web marketing, and though the tactics will differ depending on how organic search companies butt heads, the bottom line will always be reaching your customers. Keep speaking the message your customers want to hear — no matter the medium — and success will follow you.

Whether Florida or a “weather update,” when algorithms change, the web forums light up. Today’s question we talk a little bit about why this happens and why you should focus on producing quality, not riding the algo-train.

SEO Audio Episode 5