I’d be extremely surprised if Yahoo! turns this down, though in some ways I hope they do.

For many people in the advertising and marketing space, the partnership could provide a plausible contender for Google. And at least on paper the numbers add up. But if all we can expect is increased market share based purely on combining their current capital then I’m worried.

Capitalising trough integration is a big job, and I really hope at least Yahoo’s resent plans get some airtime. I had little faith in Microsoft’s search engine or their advertising product, and apart from the maps and video, I wasn’t sure if they really should have bothered entering this space in the first place.

Yahoo! is a different story, no one could deny their heritage and while they may have been spanked by Google, they have a strong userbase and social assets including flikr and delicious. It was a matter of bringing all this together – and over the last few months I believe they’ve making all the right noises for a comeback. I really hope we still get to see some of their ideas come to fruition.

Anything that reduces choice for the end user is got to be a bad thing unless we get some real innovation. I’m not holding my breath for that.

The no=follow tag was soon introduced – and most blogging platforms adopted it. All links added in the comment section would have the tag automatically added letting the search engines know, the link was not added by the author of the blog. This could allow search engines to ignore the link and stop it from interfering with the link calculation. Soon, he tag was adopted by many SEO and site owners as away of stopping PageRank leak (Yep, many still worry about this) and more recently Matt Cutts, even asked link sellers to adopt it to prevent the wrath of Google.

All seemed well, until people started to notice that links tagged with the rel=nofollow could still pass anchor text, and may be a bit of PageRank, the effects were supposedly minor – but definitely some value, providing you could scale it up.

In a recent post on Dave Naylor’s blog, Matt Cutts says Google has fixed it. Hope this time it’s for real. The real impact won’t be immediately seen, but as the effects propagate across the net, I’m sure there’ll be many sites in link networks effected by the knock-on effects of this fix.
I’d prefer they didn’t completely ignore rel=nofollow links, but use other qualitative factors to determine, if some value should be passed on.

In the study, click-through rates (Percentage of click on sponsored listings) increased by 5% in the first week and 9% in the second week. This is great news for Yahoo! and their advertisers.

They also looked at the percentage of clicks on sponsored results compared to organic results, and again the new platform appears to be enjoying a greater share of clicks. Almost a 1% increase in paid search clicks to 11% from 10% before the new system. I guess, this can be interpreted in two ways, either Yahoo!’s sponsored search is delivering more relevant results or their organic search is less satisfactory compared to their new paid search model.

Overall the result look good for Yahoo!, and I hope, Like many in the industry that Yahoo! makes a good second to Google’s ad platform.

For details on the changes introduced by Panama, SEO Roundtable has a discussion on the new platform

According to Google, they have made a change to the algorithm which prevents Google bombs from working, as opose to manual intervention

One way to do this is to compare the content on the page to the anchor text in external links. If there’re a lot of the same anchor text which doesn’t match any words on the page, then they can be fairly certain of a Google bomb and ignore those links. If one of the words in the bomb apears on the page, or a query word apears on th page then it shoud still work. So, a search for ‘White house failure’ will stll return the Bush page.

As long as you’re a bit more creative on the choice of words for the bomb and piggyback on existing words on the page and links, it would be hard for Google to stop it without making more drastic changes to the link text part of their algorithm.

Wonder if Yahoo! will follow? As for MSN, they seem to have manually prevented the Bush page appearing for ‘miserable failure’, but Blair’s still there for ‘liar’.

Read more over at Search Engine Lands

With the majority of Bandwidth taken up by Video, time spent on a site may provide a better metric, than page views, but, even this starts to fall apart when you look at shared content. If I was to reference a YouTube video on my blog, and someone was to watch it here, my analytics would report a long session, and so would You Tube’s – and the external monitoring services like Hitwise would find it difficult to make sense of any of it – may be they would show my site in the up and down stream to YouTube

In November 2006 Media Metrix reported that MySpace had a higher share of page views than Yahoo! But according to Yahoo! this was entirely down to the introduction of Ajax, which reduces the number of traditional page loads, but maintained the time people spent on the site. Ajax enables a portion of a page to be refreshed without loading an entirely new URL, which is the thing measured by nearly all analytics tools.

My RSS reader lets me read all my favourite blogs without ever going to the site. Is measuring the number of subscribers on Feedburner enough?

What about the number of people that comment on a blog, or link to it, doesn’t this show how successful you’re at being connected?

The technical challenges to evolving new metrics is probably not as difficult as creating a standards that everyone can follow and trust. Whether we use time to measure interaction, or tag events in Ajax and other applications, measure the number of comments or reviews and even links and search engine rankings, there’s much to be agreed and resolved.

What’s surprising for me isn’t the increase in searches following a TV ad, but the 53% share of searches received by Yahoo!, far exceeding its market share of 21%. Just as well for Kellogg’s, because unlike Yahoo!‘s top 10 listing which are nearly all to do with their cereal, Google results seem to be a little biased towards Ketamine. An anaesthetic, used by some as a hallucinogenic recreational drug.

The South Asian tsunami, the London Underground bombings and the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans have showcased the power of people who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time to capture history as it happens.

Unlike other public contribution schemes, like CNN’s “I-Reports”, ‘You Witness’ plant to componsate contributers, if the pictures are used by news providers.

Garlinghouse went on to say, the company didn’t have a clear strategy and was rife with interdepartmental conflicts between established lines of business and new initiatives.

I thought the funniest line was, “There are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it’s not clear if anyone is in charge.”

This couldn’t have come at a better time, Yahoo is loosing faith in the investment market and from the view point of a search fanatic, I really hope they turn it around. Don’t get me wrong, I love most things Google, but choice is essential for invention and evolution.

Personally, I don’t think Google has such a clear vision and strategy either. They’ve succeeded by being clever and a little bit lucky.

Yahoo! Has some major advantages over Google, when it comes to understanding people and social networks – concentrating on these may provide the turn around they disparately need.

Coverage at Reuters

The announcement today to use a unified protocol is great news and this kind of collaboration can only be a good thing, and hopefully will lead to more efforts to improve the web for site owners, search engines and users. The last time these guys got together, they introduced the nofollow tag to combat comment spam in blogs,  and there’re many other areas where knowledge sharing could help, from removing spam to understanding user behaviour.

You can read more here Google,  Search Engine Watch