Why I will never trust Yahoo search results
Sometimes Yahoo and MSN offer pretty similar results to Google and I find myself wondering whether they have a chance of gaining market share.
To stop this fantasy I always return to the search result on Yahoo for “mobile phones” which has been exactly the same as this since 2006. There is no way in the world this is a natural search result. Having the 4 biggest mobile networks in the UK listed in a row just isn’t possible especially when they don’t have the keywords in their titles and certainly don’t have the link profiles.
Having results that are manually edited like this in such a strange way year after year makes me think money has changed hands and that makes me never want to use Yahoo for my searches.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Patrick, I assume you know that yahoo offers a service which allows you to appear in the natural results for about 15p per click (depends on industry)
Yes, Yahoo is suitably secretive about it but a few people know it exists. Google could NEVER get away with this.
Those sites are not part of paid inclusion. There are ways to tell definitively.
Also paid inclusion does not guarantee ranking. I know because I use it. It does a few things. First, it basically makes your domain trusted or gives it authority which is a huge part of the Yahoo algo. They then allow you to specify what a page is about.
After that, there is a LOT better chance to rank on the 1st page for what you want, but if your terms are really competitive, you are still going to need a very strong domain and SEO to rank. I see some participants that rank for only longtail terms.
Also, it costs us a lot more that $0.15
Yahoo Paid Inclusion – where you submit an xml file where you control the title, description and url and the result appears to be “natural” instead of “sponsored” does exist.
That is definitely a reason not to trust Yahoo results. Advertisements should be obvious to users. Yahoo PI simply cons users into thinking a result is natural so that they are more likely to click on it, thereby earning more money for Yahoo.
I don’t think users would like that if they found out.
Only T-Mobile is SSP from those results.
If you run a search for ‘car rentals’ 5 out of the top 10 are SSP. Yahoo have been promoting to certain verticals quite hard.
SSP isn’t all that anyway, this is prob hand jobs.
And Microsoft wants Yahoo’s search??