Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been making changes that seem to have had quite an impact on search results. Back on July 14th, Yahoo! announced that it had completed an index update. Some people were happy with the change, but overall, most of the feedback was not positive. Many companies saw their top rankings on Yahoo! fall to the bottom of the results.

Then, a few weeks later, Yahoo! let their new Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) loose. As Yahoo! noted in their own Search blog, “You may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.” After implementation of the new Yahoo! Slurp, search results did not improve.

In their most recent Weather Report regarding their Search Index Update, Yahoo! directed visitors to their Site Explorer for more communication and interaction with Yahoo! Additionally, webmasters were asked to authenticate their sites. Whether or not site authentication helps improve search results on Yahoo! is still subject to debate. If you find that you’re not ranking well in Yahoo! and you’re abiding by the rules of SEO, it’s probably worth a shot.

Here’s an example of some of the bad results Yahoo! has been returning for search. On September 27th, I did a search for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor.” Let’s review the results:

1) A Plastic Surgery Savings site. Not truly Philadelphia-specific. I can’t even contact a doctor here – only put in my name & email for someone to contact me. Not a very good result.
2) Another Plastic Surgery Savings site. Comparing paragraphs on this page to #1, you start noticing that the content duplication is remarkable. Additionally, if Yahoo! is going to rank two pages from the same site in back-to-back positions, couldn’t they be grouped together like Google does?
3) A blog page that simply mentions searching for “Philadelphia Liposuction Doctor” in the context of free speech in the U.S. Bad result.
4) A directory page from e-comoutlet.com. Bad result.
5) A “Philadelphia Guide” page from criany.org – pretty much a scraper site. Bad result.
6) Actual plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area. YAHOO! Good result.
7) Philadelphia page from Looking Your Best. Looking Your Best is a portal site operated by an internet marketing company for plastic surgeons. Good result.
8) Plastic surgeon in Philadelphia area’s website. Good result.
9) Scraper site. Bad result.
10) Philly plastic surgeon’s site. Good result.

Overall, not very good results from this Yahoo! search. Try the same search in Google and see what comes back. Looks much better to me. For now, I think I’ll stick to Google for my searches – a lot less hunting to find quality results.

So what does this mean for your search results? Yahoo! still seems to be working on their search. It might take some time to see where things settle out. In the meantime, it’s hard to sacrifice good rankings on Google on MSN while trying to figure out the new Yahoo! algorithm. Search is sometimes a game of wait and see.

One of the hardest statistics to determine in Natural search engine optimization is how rankings on the SERPS affects click through rates and ROI. Ranking #1 leads to how many more clicks than #2? I thought I had myself an answer.

Recently AOL shared data with the world on anonymous search behavior that ended up being a PR nightmare. However some interesting information came from that mishap. Most notably was what percentage of click throughs occurred at each ranking position. On the surface the AOL data shows that 42% of users click on the first link, and 12% were on the second position.

However as I was reading the hitwise blog, or was it their newsletter–I can’t find the report! I realized that in the travel space most of the top 10 search terms were branded like:

Southwest
United Airlines
South west
US Airways
etc

Well lets be honest google has made us lazy, for some clients their top 20 referrers are all branded, many people actually type “www.southwest.com” in a search engine to go to the site. So you may be wondering where I’m going with all of this? Here’s the punch:

It is feasible that the 42% of people that click on the first listing it makes sense because they know exactly what they are seeking. What I would be interested in seeing with that AOL data is how click throughs compare on branded versus non-branded terms, as I would think that someone that types in “southwest airlines” is more likely to click on the first link (and probably not the second) because they found exactly what they were seeking. However someone that types in “cheap airline tickets” may not be seeking a particular company (or they would probably have searched for that company, right?).

This leads me to think that a search for a more generic term will tend to attract more clicks on many positions other than just the #1 spot.

The other question I have is how prevalent are branded searches? Well according to a hitwise study 75 of the top 100 searches involve trademarked terms. Many of these searches the top position are clicked often simply because most of the big searches include branded or trademarked terms. All the more reason why you should read our blog post on how big brands screw up search.

Just a quick example on the way out…Nike ranks #1 for “Nike” type in “Nike running shoes” and they are on page 3 in position #30! Oh when will they learn?

There has been a lot of talk recently about the long tail, especially timed around the release of Chris Anderson’s new book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

So what exactly is the long tail? When visitors are looking for your website, they will type many different terms into
search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, when you are able to examine exactly what those terms are, there usually is a core group of terms that are searched frequently and then a multitude of terms that are typed into the search engines only a few times leading visitors to your site. The terms that are searched infrequently are what everyone calls the long tail.

Here’s an example. If you are BMW, one for your core terms might be “BMW 3 Series.” In searching for a BMW 3 Series, keyword research reveals that people type in all kinds of long tail terms as well. These terms are typed in (in the aggregate) more frequently than the 20,000+ times a month people search for “BMW 3 Series”. Some of these long tail terms include things like, “2007 BMW 3 Series coupe,” “2007 BMW 3 Series,” 2007 BMW 3 Series convertible,” “2006 BMW 3 Series,” and “BMW 3 Series parts.”

The long tail search terms can be important to your business. As customers proceed through the buy cycle, they usually become more educated consumers and refine their searches. Therefore, visitors to your website who come from more specific (long tail) terms are often closer to finishing the purchasing process. Thus, finding and targeting the long tail
of search is often a lucrative practice. Let’s say I’m looking to buy a new camera. When I’m just starting out my research (early in my buy cycle), I might search for something broad like “digital camera.” I do a little investigation and realize
that I want to buy a particular brand, so I then search for “Sony digital camera.” Once I am ready to make my purchase, I might be searching for long tail terms like “Sony Cybershot DSC-H2” or “buy Sony Cybershot online.” Moreover, I might find these terms on a shopping search engine, where if a site selling Sony Cybershot cameras is not ranking well, they will lose the opportunity to gain a sale.

To read more about the long tail and to see a graphical representation, click here.