SEO Blog

When the founder, or co-founder of any company leaves, it usually marks a pretty significant turning point. Either they have become out of touch with the company as a whole or new bosses are seeking a completely fresh start. In the case of Jerry Yang’s departure from Yahoo, it’s difficult to see which is the most likely scenario.

Let’s not forget that it was Yang who decided, catastrophically as it turned out, not to sell to Microsoft back in 2008, when they bid $31 per share – 62% above the market price at the time. That valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion. As things stand, the share price has spluttered and fallen to half of Microsoft’s valuation, leaving a lot of investors out of pocket.
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It’s been a long time in the making, but the Bing/Yahoo merger has finally landed on these shores. Whilst our American compatriots have been using a Microsoft-powered Yahoo for almost 12 months, tomorrow marks the first integration here in the UK.

This European roll-out marks the first real move towards full integration between the two search companies. Of course it has been on the cards for some time, but any kind of announcement seemed elusive – at least until now. So what does this all mean?
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In the UK, Google controls 92% of the search market. By anybody’s standards, that’s a pretty hefty chunk. However, it isn’t total by any means and over in America the margin is much smaller. So whilst it would be wise to focus 92% of your energy going for gold on Google, make sure you don’t forget about Bing and the rest.

The search ranking factors don’t change massively across the different platforms, so you won’t need to makeover your entire site to adhere to the whims of Yahoo. However, it is worth taking a few simple minor steps to ensure that you are able to keep a close eye on your performance on each.
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Yahoo have started negotiations with Alibaba and other shareholders over being ‘appropriately compensated’ for the sale of Alipay, the payment system owned and used by the internet retailer.

Two weeks ago, the Chinese e-commerce giant shifted the ownership of Alipay to another company, incidentally also owned by Jack Ma, the Chief Executive of Alibaba. It has been suggested this was due to a change in Chinese regulations that stated ownership of payment groups, such as Alipay, must be based in China. Bad news for Yahoo then.

The initial news sparked fear from analysts and investors that this could seriously devalue Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba, especially as Alipay was so far out of reach for them. Two weeks ago their shares fell 7%, which increased to a drop of nearly 13% yesterday. In monetary terms, that’s a drop of $2 billion off the internet company’s valuation.
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It’s all too easy to forget about Yahoo these days. However, once upon a time (the mid to late 90′s to be precise), it was THE name in search. The company was huge and growing exponentially year on year, but then along came Google.

Since the turn of the century the popularity of Yahoo has been dwindling. Its successes have largely been dwarfed by its massive failings. However, despite ten years of shrinking relevance, the company is still alive and kicking. Other businesses may have died a painful death a long time ago, however Yahoo is still going and still has decent revenue.

This weekend, The New York Times provided an interesting insight into the successes and failings of the company and, more particularly, Chief of Product Development Blake Irving. Despite its 680 million users, including 250 million for their free Mail service, many people still don’t take them seriously as a search engine, a content provider or a realistic online company of the future.
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Google has become a generic term for search. I use it as such quite regularly in this blog, more often than not because that is what readers expect. We optimise for Google because, in the UK at least, they have a 90% share of the search market. By any standards, that’s pretty impressive.

Very few websites are ever going to be brave enough to optimise solely for Ask or Bing. Whilst they do control a slender slice of the overall searches being performed day in day out, ignoring Google in pursuit of a niche would be foolhardy at best.

Unfortunate as it may be, the priority is and will continue (for the foreseeable future at least) to be with Google. That’s where the people are going, it is on their pages that you’ll earn most traffic. This often creates a narrow, even blinkered approach to Search Engine Optimisation. Why go after 2% of the searchers when there’s 90% coming from one source?
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Even seasoned marketers tend to refer to ‘Google’ as the generic search engine. Many people focus huge attention on getting to the top of Google and treat the others as also-rans. But is this attitude out-dated?

Here in the UK, Google commands a huge percentage of the overall search market. Recent figures suggest that they receive 9 out of every 10 searches. This puts them in a commanding position and, in many respects, justifies why they receive so much attention from SEO types.

But whilst they remain the safe bet and the most likely to deliver high quantities of traffic to your site, it isn’t fair to simply dismiss the likes of Yahoo, Bing and even Ask. After all, between them they do still command 10% of the search market.
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Whenever people ask about SEO, they tend to just refer to improving their Google ranking. This isn’t a huge surprise, particularly as Google have a 90% grip on the UK search market, but it might be a little short sighted.

Of course SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, not just Google Optimisation. This means you are looking to increase your site’s strength in the eyes of all search engines, not just a select few, or even just one. However, each different engine employs a unique algorithm. There are numerous similarities, but there are also subtle differences.

You might get only a trickle of visitors from the likes of Bing and Yahoo, but every little counts. The danger with being entirely Google-centric is that you can often find yourself falling foul of major algorithm updates, perfectly demonstrated by the recent Mayday issue.
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As always the world of search has moved forward in huge leaps over the past 12 months. We have welcomed new sites – such as Bing – and have prepared to say goodbye to a few famous old names, not least Yahoo.

So what have the changes in 2009 meant for SEO in 2010? Well, the emphasis that has been emerging over the last year has very much been on the quality of websites. Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, have been cracking down on those disguising bad sites with good SEO; which has resulted in huge changes in rankings.
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If you’ve been following the latest online news with even a casual interest, you will no doubt have read a good deal about the various changes going on with the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Google are currently in the process of rolling of their real-time element within the search engine results. Bing too have adopted these Twitter updates and will soon be getting Facebook messages to display too. So what does this mean for SEO? Well, not a lot really. Yes, it is a significant change and the SERPs pages will look different; but ultimately it won’t affect your ability to optimise for certain key phrases and achieve a high level ranking.
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