With the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance agreement, the future of many Yahoo Search Marketing tools, such as Site Explorer and Yahoo Web Analytics, is unclear. This presentation from SMX West looks at the tools concerned and alternatives.

1. Microsoft + Yahoo: What’s It All Mean?
Yahoo Search Marketing Tools:
What's at Risk &
How to Avoid Surprises
SMX West
Sean Carlos
4 March 2010
Sean Carlos 1
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

2. Ju
Yahoo Announces Effective Exit ly
20
from the Search Engine Business 09
● Microsoft (Bing)
– provides development & management of
search engine results technology
– provides search & content network ad
platform
– manages relationship with all but elite group of
advertisers
● Yahoo
– for Yahoo properties, provides user interface
on top of Microsoft Bing data
Sean Carlos 2
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

3. Uncertainties for
SEO & PPC Web Marketers
●
SEO
– Source of free, if limited, link data
●
SEO + PPC
– Keyword data from reliable source
●
– Site data from well regarded Web SEO + PPC
Analytics tool
● No equivalent Microsoft solution available
Sean Carlos 3
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

4. Yahoo Site Explorer
Source of Competitive Backlinks
Sean Carlos 4
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

5. Yahoo Today
 Up to 1000 inbound links to any page
 Data from crawling
infrastructure (fresh & deep)
 Data can be exported to spreadsheet
 Programmatic interface (API)
– Augment data with other sources, e.g. Alexa
 1000 links very limiting at times
 No anchor text, nofollow, authority info
Sean Carlos 5
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

6. After Outsourcing to ?
● keeps it to demonstrate
continued commitment to user search
 not keeping self-service ad platform
● Bing takes over Site Explorer
engender goodwill from search professionals
 /msn removed support for link operators
in March 2007
● Site Explorer shuts down
e
je re
ur
on u
ct
C P
Sean Carlos 6
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

7. Competitive Link Data Alternatives
Who's Crawling the Web?
● Task is immense - few are up to it
– 300+ bln web pages to crawl
● Crawling dimensions
– breadth (# domains, geographies)
– depth (%pages/domain)
– freshness
– history
● Tool quality is conditioned by data source!
Sean Carlos 7
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

8. Link Data
The Search Engines
● Yahoo Site Explorer is most generous
● Bing & offer data for our sites
– Enable webmaster dashboards
● offers link: operator
– Only shows a subset of links knows
● Misleads lots of folks not in the know
● Ask does not offer link data
Sean Carlos 8
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

9. Link Data
The Search Engines
● Other major search engines crawling web
– afaik, they don't offer back link data
Sean Carlos 9
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

10. MajesticSEO
www.majesticseo.com
● Search engine project begun in 2004
– link data released 2/2008
● Current (2/2010) DB has
– 170 bln unique crawled pages
– 1,474 bln unique urls (in pages crawled)
– 6.5 trillion (10^12) mapping relationships (url
pointing to url)
● Fresh: “most of index crawled in last year”
● Free basic data & reports for our domains
Sean Carlos 10
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

11. ● Launched 10/2008 by seoMoz
● Current DB is smaller than MajesticSEO
– ~43+ bln pages
– ~440+ bln links
● Data source & reliability not clear
● Open Site Explorer is limited free interface
● Free API, with restrictions
– http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/SEOmoz-Free-API
Sean Carlos 11
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

12. Alexa
● An Amazon.com division, offers various
internet data & statistics
● Powers Internet Archive Wayback Machine
● Web interface offers simple reporting, 20
results / page, 5 pages max.
– Replace <domain> with simple domain
● http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/<domain>
● API, 15¢ / 1000 requests
– http://aws.amazon.com/awis/
Sean Carlos 12
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

13. Sean Carlos 13
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

14. Keyword Research
Sean Carlos 14
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

15.  Free for YSM customers
 Attractive alternative to Google
hegemony
 Yahoo is divesting itself of costly
technology & associated infrastructure:
– search engine technology
– search and contextual ad platform
 What's the business case to keep Yahoo!
Web Analytics?
Sean Carlos 15
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

16.  Dennis R. Mortensen, Director of Data
Insights at Yahoo! (YWA):
“...don’t worry about YWA, what you (the
industry) should worry about is; what is MS
to do when not having a serious external
pre- and post-click analysis and reporting
tool they can give to their advertisers?”
Sean Carlos 16
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

17. ● Microsoft is obvious acquisition candidate
 doesn't currently offer WA platform
 advertisers now turn to Google for tool
 a generally free tool would be excellent
● source of web intelligence to improve search
algorithms
● PR
 adCenter Analytics (LiveMetrics) experience
 Microsoft suffers from a well documented
Internet attention deficit disorder.
Sean Carlos 17
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

18. ● What to do now
 install additional tracking code for alternative
system
 back up historic data
● Save reports / export report data
Sean Carlos 18
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com

19. Thank you!
Sean Carlos
Web Marketing Training & Consulting
www.antezeta.com/blog
Tel: +1 617 765 0250 (US)
+39 02 69 000 333 (Europe)
Skype: sean-carlos
Twitter: seancarlos
Sean Carlos 19
www.antezeta.com/blog
sean@antezeta.com