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Yahoo Attempting to Keep Google and MSN Users

Caught this today when performing a search for other engines while on Yahoo. First time I’ve seen an engine attempt to keep their users from jumping to another engine, which is very common practice as indicated by my Actual Top 10 Search Terms of 2006 post.

I was performing a search for MSN search (or “Live”) in Yahoo because I didn’t have it in my Firefox search dropdown.

Here’s what I saw:
MSN Search on Yahoo

I wasn’t paying very close attention and started typing in my search into the Yahoo shortcut search box shown above. Notice it says: “You could go to MSN. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

I can’t recall seeing this before, so I decided to see if they were doing the same thing to Google (which has got to be one of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo):

Google search on Yahoo

Again, notice it says: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

Seems strange to have a Yahoo shortcut for something you were already immersed in. What do you think about this? Is it right? Would Yahoo be pissed if Microsoft or Google did the same?

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Long Tail of Search

Finally some solid evidence showing how long the long tail of search really is! Having worked for some big high-traffic sites, I was always discouraged with the underestimation of the true length of the long tail in other public reports. Finally I did my own research and it was published on the Hitwise blog:

Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search

Long Tail of Search Research

Here’s a sneak peak:

“After great dissatisfaction with the existing research, which I felt vastly understated the true size of the long tail, I decided to do my own research…There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Understanding the long tail and how to target it from an SEO standpoint is no simple task. I hope this article sheds some light on how important long tail traffic is.

In my experience, I’ve ranked for head terms and I’ve ranked for millions of tail terms. I’d gladly trade in the head terms for a larger piece of the tail. A few companies have learned this, including the search engines, but they’d prefer you don’t know how much of a gold mine it really is.

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Upcoming Search Conference Schedule

Being a small company in-house SEO for the past decade has made getting to conferences difficult for me, but I’ve managed to attend a lot of search conferences and still find them very valuable (not so much the sessions themselves, but the out of session/networking conversations). Here’s what I’ve got on schedule for the remainder of the year:

August: SES San Jose
This must be my 4th or 5th SES San Jose in a year. I’ve been there as an attendee, a speaker, and now will attend as press. I look forward to covering the event, but will only be attending Sunday night through Wednesday night. Hope to see you there.

October: MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Arizona

Never been to a MarketingProfs event and never been to Arizona. Looking forward to this event. You’ll find me speaking on link building tactics and the current rise of the now famous digital marketing bootcamp which seems to be getting a lot of attention from everyone.

November: PubCon
Hoping to attend PubCon this year – it will be my 3rd in a row if I do attend. I’ve covered the event as press, as an attendee and hope to attend as a speaker this year (though it appears many of the speaking spots have already been assigned).

Hope to see you at one of these events! Also, let me know if there are any others I should consider attending.

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Jane and Robot Events

I attended my first Jane and Robot event on June 25th at the office of Ignition Partners. As you might suspect, a search event geared towards developers & designers attracts your regular assortment of web geeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the audience was dissapointed that they never got to lay eyes on Jane, nor meet the Robot.

jane and robot

Jeff Pollard gave a rapid talk on AJAX SEO pitfalls. Though it was nothing new to me, the audience seemed to receive it well – Jeff’s really knows his stuff. What I was most surprised by was the number of people I hadn’t met before and the Q&A afterwards. People asked very pointed questions like: “Does PPC affect your organic rankings” and “if we are already crawled well, why should we use sitemaps?”

I really appreciate Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia volunteering their time to educate developers on white-hat SEO and creating an opportunity for SEOs to meet up from time-to-time. Jane and Robot is a service that should be embraced and promoted by those in the search industry.

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Inside Google Kirkland

I finally made my first visit to Google Kirkland a couple days ago for a study. I’ve been to Google’s HQ several times, but had never visited the local campus. Well, I suppose it isn’t really a campus – I’d call it a shared office building with lots of cool Google logo art and not much else.

Google KirklandI didn’t get to tour the entire building, but spent some time in the lobby & in the R&D areas. In the lobby, they were playing what I assumed to be the rolling search ticker I’ve seen at their parties on the wall, but the projector was much too weak to discern the text, so I it seemed like a waste. I imagine the janitors enjoy it when the lights are off. Overall, the space was unimpressive for Google, but I’m sure the new Google Kirkland campus will rock.

The one unintentional piece of humor I discovered was when I was getting my badge. They have you sit down and type in your info, then choose between visitor types:

  • Normal
  • Government

I joked that I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive.

Photo credit: PRWeaver Blog