Just getting a "sanity check"
Posted October 27th, 2008 by bendouglas
in
Hello Group-I met several of you at the last event-I look forward to the next one!
That said, I've come across something that I'm a little puzzled on. Of course almost no one pays all THAT much attention to Yahoo these days so it's possible that's the reason it appears to have slipped past about every major SEO who's blog/website I would go to, but I'm almost starting to wonder if I'm just a little off on this anyway, so I wonder if anyone else has looked critically enough to get the same results:
Long and short, from what I can see, Yahoo has dialed up customization/personalization to an almost 100% level. If you do the same search on 2 different computers, you will get different results-and that's the result of greater customization from Yahoo (and Google is not far behind-their results appear to be customized an increasing percentage of the time as well).
My question-has anyone else recognized this as well? If so, is this just an "open secret" in the SEO world right now because of what it will mean to a lot of working SEO's right now? Am I just "off my rocker" and is Yahoo instead "broken" as someone on another message board tried to tell me?
From what I can see, some sites will benefit from increased customization (as in more so than with traditional rankings) and others will suffer (worse than with traditional rankings). While this may be an SEO game changer, the opportunity now is to show clients how to be one of the sites that will benefit.
Anyway, wondering if anyone else has seen it and/or if this is just something that no one wants to discuss right now.
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Good Question
I have to be honest. I don't really check Yahoo! much, but have seen some of this with Google.
My answer to personalization has been to do away with ranking reports and gauge effectiveness much more heavily through Google Analytics keyword reporting. The analytic don't lie. If my Yahoo or Google traffic for keyword x goes up 20% I know I'm doing better regardless of what I see myself ranking for.
I'm sure everyone is already doing this, but watching conversion rates, click through and time on site are also important because of the metrics the engines are likely using to personalize the search experience. If they see users clicking on a listing, and staying there once they have, that domain will likely be served up more frequently for that user. Again, watching analytics and doing a lot of Google Web Optimizer experiments.
Other factors that I see being important are the engine's bookmarking services, subscribers through the engine's rss services (Feedburner, Google Reader, My Yahoo! etc.), and also the (speculation --->) amount of navigational searches for a site's brand name. If an engine sees a user consistently typing in a obscure term like Jack's Wacky Flower Shop, they know that the site associated with that brand and should be served more frequently.
- May the rank be with you
Veyr Strange
I just started working with the gentleman thats owns sterlingsilverjewelry.com and the results are strange. Google Page 18-20 on "sterling silver jewelry" - on the same search phrase Yahoo is Spot #2 on Page 1. WTF?
I would say Yahoo weights the domain name to search term much more heavily than Google (obviously). i don't know exactly how they could differ sooooo much