Yahoo Japan Switching to Google as Search Provider
In a surprising development, Yahoo Japan just announced that it would be switching to Google as its search technology and paid search provider. Now, before we all think and ask how could this be possible especially since Yahoo and Microsoft have been starting to work on their search ad integration deal recently. The answer lies in the fact that Yahoo Japan is not entirely own by Yahoo. Hence it has no full control of the Japanese site.
Yahoo owns only 35% share of Yahoo Japan. While Japanese Internet service provider Softbank owns around 40% of share of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo Japan is operated independently as a separate publicly traded company with Mr. Masahiro Inoue sitting as its President and CEO while Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang sitting on the board.
Of course, the deal is not going to pass through without opposition by various groups. Microsoft for one definitely was not please with this alliance between Google and Yahoo Japan. Japanese regulators might also look at this deal in the negative way as the alliance would corner a big chunk of the Japanese search ad market. Google currently has more than 38% of the search volume in Japan while Yahoo Japan has more than 53%. The terms of the deal as well as its date of implementation are still unknown.
So, what do you think? Will the deal push through or will Google and Yahoo Japan face some more strong opposition from other market stakeholders?
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Weekly Search & Social News: 07/27/2010
Hello ladies and gentleman, geeks and phreaks alike, it’s time for another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ ? It was a damned busy week out in the trenches last week and it was again tough to decide what to include and what not too. But hey, that’s always a good thing as far as I am concerned. Oh, and I learned something too… I am a jaded reader. Yup, tis true. You see many of the older geeks often say there is nothing but regurgitation out there. But I stopped to think about it and well, for peeps just getting into the business, old topics we’ve covered a zillion times, is actually NEW to them. Thus I realized I shouldn’t be bitching about it… just sayin’. It is something to consider next time ya bitch about it. M’kay?
And away we go….
Lead Story
Are link builders SEOs?
Over the last year or so I have been talking to some friends, old and new, about the world of link building and it’s place in SEO. Or more specifically, is it actually part of SEO? You see when I talk to some folks, most often the more seasoned vets, they tend to see it as ‘link marketing’, ‘relationship marketing’ or even as a promotional activity.
And so I wanted to highlight my pal Ben McKay’s article; Homage to the Business of Link-Building – which discusses this very topic.
The funny thing is that if you’d asked me 18 months ago I’d give you a big ‘duh’ and move on. But now I have done the proverbial 180 and tend to believe that it truly isn’t purely SEO… moreso the promotional aspect than anything else. Consider social media. Just because if does have benefits to SEO, does that means it is part of the SEO fold? Not at all…that would be silly to say.
Links are considered votes or even ‘reach’ and to me SEO covers the more technical aspects and has some cross over into the world of content strategy. Now, I haven’t gone completely mad, I understand the value of links to SEO, I am merely now of the mind that it is a stand alone discipline as much as social media marketing and usability are.
And that’s my own 2c on the matter – we will be talking about this more on SEO Dojo Radio this week
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Microsoft Rebuilds Bing Webmaster Tools from the Ground Up
Microsoft has just launched a newly updated Bing Webmaster Tools which according to the Bing Community Blog is a huge improvement to the old Microsoft Webmaster Tools. The update was being carried out after Bing has reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities who are in unison in wanting to have more transparency on how Bing crawls and indexes websites, more control of their website contents in the Bing index as well as more useful information for site optimization on Bing.
The “retooled” Bing Webmaster Tools now gives you a simplified and more intuitive experience on crawl, index and traffic. Some of its key features include:
* Index Explorer – provides access to browse through Bing index to check which of your site’s directories and pages have been included in Bing’s search index
* Submit URLs – provides Bing with signal on which URLs it should include in the index
* Crawl issues – lets you view details on redirects, malware and exclusions
* Block URLs – prevents specific URLS from appearing in Bing SERPs.
The new Bing Webmaster Tools also uses Microsoft Silverlight enabling it to deliver rich charting functionality which is useful for analyzing up to six months of crawling, indexing and traffic data Bing has for your websites.
For existing Bing Webmster Tools users, their old account can be used for logging in to the new Bing Webmaster Tools.
So, are you still using Bing Webmaster Tools? What can you say about the new design and functionality of the tools?
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Links Ahoy! Turn Copied Content to Instant Links
“Content is King” would probably be one of the greatest online myths of all time (well for me at the very least). Yes, we all know and agree that great content will always be invaluable, but great content in a mediocre website? It’s like having a great and wise king alone in an old crumbling castle waiting to disappoint bandits with no loot (poor raiders IMHO!).
What I’m saying here is that design and usability is as important as ever today. Great content, to be well appreciated, deserves a well-designed and usable home. By not making your content readable, consumable, share-able, and what not, what’s the point? You’ll never attract bandits to steal your content (having raiders clamoring for your content = epic win!)!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for content pirates and scrapers, but be informed that there’s a new way of looking at people who actually copy your content for the sake of admiration, approval, and mere quotation. Take a look at Tynt, the copy/paste service.
So What Does it Do?
Tynt as a Traffic Driver
Tynt is in essence an automated link attribution service, which means that any snippet of content copied from your blog or website and then pasted onto other webpages, social networks, or email, will automatically include a URL back to your original content page.
Aside from having all of these links driving traffic back to your site, another important aspect of this would be on the user-side of things where readers are informed directly of the content’s original source–sort-of-like-a-human-front-end version of the canonical tag eh?
Tynt as a Link Building Tool
Good news to SEOs, having an automated link attribution service running on your site will make link building much less of a hassle. All you have to do is add great content (and I do mean great) and you have another avenue to generate links from.
Tynt as Engagement Analytics
On top of making your content work harder by automatically sending you traffic through inbound links, Tynt adds icing on the cake by making everything measurable (Yes! Measurable!). Basically, you can measure how much content was copied from your pages, what pages content was copied from, where your content was pasted, to how much traffic all of these link attributions sent back to you site.
Tynt also provides users with heat maps of the pages where content was copied from, thus adding more value to webmasters who constantly work hard on improving their properties–just imagine amount of insight you can derive from all this data.
What’s the Catch?
I’ve probably given you the most concise review of Tynt’s service and I guess it’s about time for me to tell you what’s hiding underneath this golden sheath. Well, sad to say you get all of this for the minimal price of…uhm it’s FREE!
However, take note, nothing’s perfect and thus I’ll share with you the lowdown of some the improvements I would definitely appreciate from Tynt.
1. Anchor Text - this has always been an important factor for SEOs and sad to say Tynt doesn’t give us the capability (as of now at least) to modify the kind of anchor text our link attributions will have on other sites. What we get however are link prefixes and suffixes (e.g. More from SEO Taoist: http://www.seotaoist.com/)
2. URL Shortening – based on behavior a lot of real people share content via social media, we have Facebook, Twitter, and of course Google Buzz. The problem when people copy snippets of content from our site is that Tynt displays the full path of the URL and (again at least for now) doesn’t detect if content is being shared on character-dependent services like Twitter.
3. Content Pirates and Scrapers - there are two types of content pirates, the automated robots who scrape the web for content and the copycat who’s so lazy and desperate he/she can’t write his/her own. Correct me if I’m wrong but I do think that by having Tynt running, we’ll have less problems with robot scrapers because we’ll have attributed links pointing back to us on all of these pages. However, people who manually copy content can easily remove the automated links generated by Tynt. My question is, can Tynt actually track content piracy with out the generated link? This is me thinking of having a Copyscape-like tool running on my site.
4. Content Type – simple question is, is Tynt’s service limited to text as of the moment? It would be interesting to see how their service can evolve to include videos, images, and other objects as well.
Is it Difficult to Apply?
Not quite, it’s as simple as registering your site and pasting a script much like GA on your site or blog template and your done. It took me roughly a minute or less registering and installing it myself.
We Want to See it Work!
As much as I’m hesitant to do a shameless plug (but I have to for the sake of your first hand experience!), kindly check out my site at SEO Taoist, my Internet marketing philosophy blog and really read through my articles (let’s keep the experience real guys!). If you find anything interesting, a snippet of content you really like for example, share it to your friends through your blog or social media and from there you’ll see how Tynt works–it’s currently running on my site.
To make you creatively appreciate Tynt more, please do bother and take a look at my article about mind control and local search and see how you can be a link genius by leveraging on choice architecture and reciprocation with the help of Tynt.
As always, I’m looking forward to your comments and suggestions. Feel free to share your take on improving Tynt’s service as well, I bet the guys from Tynt will be more than thankful.
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