The Major Players
Launch of Yahoo's Panama Interface - Sort Of...
After several months of talk and speculation, Yahoo! finally released its much awaited new revamp of Sponsored Search yesterday. You may be logging into your account right now to see the difference, and be surprised to see that nothing has changed. That's because, while it has been released, not all accounts have been switched over.
Yahoo is currently in the process of inviting select US advertisers to upgrade their accounts, so for now at least, not everyone can enjoy the updated features.
Invitations will be sent in stages to the US advertisers over the remainder of 2006 and into early 2007. Users will receive a notification of their upgrade date at least 2 weeks prior. At this time you will also be able to access a preview of what your account will look like after the upgrade has been completed to help you become familiar with the new layout and features. This approach is to allow advertisers the choice of which back end they prefer, however, once the switch has been made the old interface will no longer be accessible.
In order to aid advertisers with the new account structure Yahoo has created their "Upgrade Center " which provides tips, tutorials, and FAQ's. Soon they will also be launching their Yahoo! Marketing Solutions blog to provide users the help and advice they may need as well as future updates to the system.
For years Yahoo! has offered a bid for placement where your bid solely decides the ranking of your ads. Early in 2007 this will change for a more comprehensive system which will check the bid as well as the ad quality and other factors similar to the way Google currently ranks their paid ads.
For advertisers who don't want to wait for an invitation, Yahoo! supplied an option for early request . While they will not be able to accept all advertisers who wish to upgrade early, they will notify those who are accepted at least two weeks prior to when your new system access is enabled.
While we'll have to wait a little bit longer to see the full switch it's great to see that it's just about here.
More Control Over Googlebot
Googles Webmaster Tools have taken another step forward with advanced spider reporting and control features.
New Googlebot activity reports are quite interesting and graphically spell out the frequency of visits to your site over the past 90 days. Data displayed includes the number of pages crawled per day, bandwidth used, and the total time spend downloading pages. It also displays the maximums, minimums, and daily averages for each.
So how is this useful? If you feel that Googlebot needs a bit more guidance on your site, you can use the new Crawl Rate Control to help with spider visit frequencies.
If you find that Googlebot is sucking back too much bandwidth you can set this to "slower". This will reduce Google's visits and your server resource use, however the downside is it may not be able to crawl your site as often.
If you select "faster", Googlebot will do just that, spider your site more quickly, but you will also notice a downside of a larger load on your server.
By default sites are set at "normal" which is recommended in most cases.
These two new features are discussed in some more detail by Vanessa Fox on the Google Webmaster Central Blog .
Ask Mobile Search Released
Last week Ask announced Ask.com Mobile Search designed specifically for the mobile web and your cell phone. With numerical shortcuts to make selecting options quick and easy, now you can search online with ease. Ask also remembers your most recent queries to prevent you from having to retype them.
Ask Mobile incorporates more than just regular search; image search, weather, area code lookup, currency conversion, horoscopes, time zones, and maps, probably one of the most useful aspects of searching the web via your phone.
by Scott Van Achte - Senior SEO
