Yahoo Sells Its Top Positions To The Highest BidderWritten by Sage Lewis
In a move that caused a great deal of commotion in search engine optimization world this week, Yahoo has now partnered with Overture (formerly Goto.com) to provide 3 sponsored listings at top of a search results page and 2 sponsored listings at bottom of each search results page.This was announced Tuesday November 13 and was implemented that Thursday. The first results page of a search gives position 1,2 and 3 from Overture and results 4 and 5 are at bottom of results page. This is continued as you continue to click through Yahoo results pages. The second Yahoo results page gives you listing numbers 6,7 and 8 at top and listing numbers 9 and 10 at bottom. This pattern appears to continue throughout Yahoo listings. However, if there are more listings in Yahoo than there are number of sponsored listings in Overture, then cycle repeats itself. The sponsored listings appear in both main directory listings and secondary listings produced by Google. As an example, doing a search for phrase 'hammock chairs' in Web Pages section of Yahoo (these are secondary results produced by Google), there are only 25 paid advertisers on Overture as of today. But there are 5630 listing in Google-driven listings of Yahoo. There are 5 Overture listings for every 20 Yahoo listings. So at listing 101-120 it cycles back to paid listings 1 through 5 from Overture. You can see this example by going here: http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=hammock+chairs&hc=0&hs=22
| | Product Review: RobogenWritten by Richard Lowe
Are you familiar with Robot Exclusion Standard? This is a way whereby you can inform search engines and other automated spiders (programs which scan your web sites for information) what pages and directories are not to be examined. The standard is precisely defined and a little obscure, and while not overly complicated it can be difficult to understand.There is help available, believe it or not. That obscure file called "robots.txt" no longer needs to be hand-edited. No longer do you need to type in server path names, remember robot and spider names and enter strange symbols which don't seem to make any sense. Okay, here's a quick review. The "robots.txt" file simply lists spiders that you want to prevent from listing all or part of your site. Along with each spider is list of directories and files that it is not allowed to examine. Wildcards are allowed. It's not very difficult but it is time consuming if you have lots of robots and files to specify. In addition, it's easy to misspell something and fali to achieve your goal. Now, someone has created a nice little piece of shareware called RoboGen, and it's not very expensive considering benefits that you will receive.
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