As promised Yahoo has now started changing it minimum bids on keywords within customers PPC accounts. They have said that the minimum bid changes were to improve the experience of their customers but in their explanation they compared it to an auction house setting minimum bids on items to insure that someone did not walk away with a valuable item at too low a price. With that example, it would appear to me that the main reason for the increase in minimum bids would be to increase the money that Yahoo makes from its advertising customers. From what I have seen most keywords remained the same and some increased a small amount (less than $0.10) per click and then some increased 2 to 4 times from the bids.  These last increase have made some of the keywords simply too expensive except for the advertisers with the larger budgets.

Now for a break-down of how Yahoo determined the increases. They based the minimum keyword bid amount on a number of factors with the main 2 being Quality and Value. The Quality part is really the only part that you can do anything about. The quality is basically a measure of the relevance of the keyword to your ad and the landing page. Of course there are some other factors that go into this such as keyword history and click through rate but the part for you to concentrate on will be the overall relevance of the keyword to the Ad and the Landing page. The other main item that Yahoo is basing the increase on is the keyword value and basically this is determined by the popularity of the keyword and the amount advertisers are willing to bid on the term.

We will have to wait and see if Yahoo makes any adjustments to this new way of setting minimum bids but until then the best thing to do is to concentrate on making you ad groups as small and similar as possible so that you can insure that the keyword, ad and landing page are as relevant as possible to help you control the only part of the process that you can.

Dwayne Clough
PPC Marketing Manager

Yahoo Search Marketing has been switching users over to the new Panama Version since the 4^th Quarter of 2006.  I have had the pleasure of working with the new Panama Version of Yahoo since November 2006.  While not everything is as user-friendly as I would like, it is a great improvement over the older version. 

Let’s start by reviewing a few of the Pros of the new system:

1. One of my favorites is being able to group together like keywords and write one or more Ads for all of them instead of individual Ads for each term.
2. The time it now takes to get items through the editorial review process is normally less than 5 minutes, where before it could take 3 or 4 days.
3. It allows you to be more specific when needing to geographically target a campaign; now you can target individual states.
4. The new Panama version also allows you to set a separate budget for each individual campaign if you desire to do that.
5. Changing from the old system of bid amounts determining ad position to using relevancy (similar to Google) is a plus for evening up the competition for the top positions and better quality for the searcher.
6. Allowing for a longer version of the Ad to appear when your Ads are in one of the preferred positions.

A look at some of the Cons of the new system:

1. The conversion process is one of the biggest Cons.  Regardless of how well you try to follow the instructions prior to the conversion, expect there to be problems once your account has upgraded.  To get as close as you can, you need to make sure that the keywords you want grouped together have the same Ad, including: title, description, and destination URL.  But even doing this does not necessarily mean the system will see the keywords as being similar enough to group them together in the upgrade.
2. There is still no good way to make a lot of changes to your account unless you have at least a gold account.  The bulk upload option is only available to those accounts that spend $6,000 a year or more.
3. You’re still not able to set up schedules for your accounts to run unless you are a Platinum account; spending $80,000 or more a year.
4. Another CON is the amount of negative keywords allowed.  You are only allowed 50 negative keywords at the Account level and another 50 at the Ad Group level.  There are situations where this may not be enough to allow you to filter out unwanted traffic. 

There are more Pros and Cons and I am sure they will all vary depending on the likes and dislikes of each account user.  While I still think Yahoo has a ways to go to make their system friendlier for the normal user, the new Panama Version is a major step in the right direction.

Yahoo has finally wised up and implemented support for a new Meta robots tag that will allow you to “opt-out” from having your Yahoo! Directory title and description show up in the search results.

The tag is called “NOYDIR” or No Yahoo Directory, and can be used as follows:

meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR”

or the less common

meta name=”slurp” content=”NOYDIR”

The 2nd tag being specifically for Yahoo’s spider “Slurp“.

This is great news for site owners who feel like they’ve been handcuffed by the Yahoo! Directory editors and their minimally optimized directory listings.

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

The top three search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) announced last week that they’re all in support of a “sitemap” protocol/standard for websites.  This news should make most webmasters relax a little bit since they now only need to create a single sitemap file to appease all three engines, versus the complicated ways to do it before (multiple sitemap files).

The sitemap should be created as “sitemap.xml” and placed in the site’s root directory.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. can help you create a valid sitemap for your website and submit it to the various engines on your behalf.  If you’re interested in this service, please use the contact form on our website.