Yahoo!’s set to take on two big conferences next week. Taking a divide and conquer approach, Yahoo! will split up to attend SES in Chicago and WebmasterWorld’s PubCon in Las Vegas to participate in a total of 13 panels focusing on topics such as traffic quality, brand management and local/video search, to name a few.

Here’s where we’ll be spending our time (in addition to manning our booth at WebmasterWorld):

SES CHICAGO
December 3 – 6, 2007

Tuesday, December 4
3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search
Jeremy Kreitler, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Maps

Wednesday, December 5
10:15 – 11:15 a.m.
Digital Shelf: The Search Marketing Opportunity for Packaged Goods
Matt Wilburn, Senior Category Director, CPG

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Breaking Down Silos: Specialization With Integration
Kelly Graziadei, Senior Agency Development Director

Ad Exchanges are Changing Everything
Bill Wise, VP, Yahoo! Publisher Network

2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

WEBMASTERWORLD’S PUBCON
December 4 – 7, 2007

Tuesday, December 4
10:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Major PPC Engines – Vendor Panel
Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director of Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues
Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

11:35 a.m. – 12:50 p.m.
In House SEO
Jessica L. Bowman, Senior Marketing Manager

7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Special Event: Open Search Forum with the Engines and Special Guest Moderator Guy Kawasaki
Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Dan Boberg, Managing Director of Sales Technology, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Wednesday, December 5
10:15 – 11:30 a.m.
Local and Mobile Search
Brian Gil, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local

1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
SEO and Big Search
Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing

Thursday, December 6
10:15 – 11:30 a.m.
Brand Management
Jessica L. Bowman, Senior Marketing Manager

Video Search Engines
Bruno Furnari, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Hope to see you at the shows!

Yahoo! Search Blog team

August 29th, 2006 was an exciting day for us; it was the day after Flickr first announced their Geotagging feature using the Yahoo! Maps API, and they had exceeded their first month projection of 1 million geotagged photos in a single day. It goes to show that putting pictures and places together go hand-in-hand like peas and carrots, Bonnie and Clyde… You get the idea.

Today Flickr released two new maps-related features. The new Flickr Places pages will take some of the 30+ million publicly geotagged photos already uploaded and organize them into key themes for over 100,000 locations. Each Places page features interesting photos and photographers, related Flickr Groups, and the tags that make that area unique.

The maps page itself gets a great upgrade as well, with an improved world map where people can easily view popular and up-to-date themes. Clicking on any of these hot tags will take you to a selection of current photos from that area, tagged with more detailed information. This will provide a great visual lens into the latest interesting things happening around the world.

These new features further demonstrate our commitment to a global platform and will be available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and traditional Chinese.

Michael lawless

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

There are two constants for almost every holiday — family and food. The connection between the two is often traditions — your grandma’s stuffing, your great aunt’s gravy and, for many of you, some tryptophan-induced time on the couch watching football. But as Emeril would say, it never hurts to kick it up a notch. So, check out our newest search feature, Recipe Shortcuts, to find a few ideas that just might give grandma’s Thanksgiving, Hanukkah or Christmas recipes a bit of competition at the dinner table.

Here’s how Recipe Shortcuts work. Just add the word ‘recipes’ after what you’re looking to cook up and you’ll see a corresponding list of categories as well as top-rated recipes from 14 providers, including Epicurious, EatingWell, Food & Wine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and Martha Stewart, via Yahoo! Food.

Recipe Shortcuts allow you to search based on cuisine (e.g. ‘Italian recipes‘), ingredient (e.g. ‘turkey recipes‘), meal (e.g. ‘brunch recipes‘), and dish (e.g. cake recipes).

Perhaps a bit premature, but once the New Year rolls in, you’ll be happy to know that you can also search for diet type (e.g. ‘low fat recipes‘).

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about Yahoo! Search Sports Shortcuts. During that time, Josh Beckett carried the Red Sox through the World Series and roughly (!) half of the NFL got injured. And now, for those who like nothing but nets, I’d like to introduce our NBA and NHL player shortcuts. Both leagues recently started their relatively long seasons — a good thing, because there’s plenty of time to learn the new names and faces.

Let’s start with the NBA. The big news this offseason was the rejuvenation of the Celtics, who now feature Rajon Rondo. They also have Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. Search for these guys on Yahoo! Search to check out The Truth’s all-around game, Ray Allen’s new number (#20) and KG’s exuberant grin.

Look for the position-specific stats; you’ll see steals and 3-pointers for guards as well as blocks and field-goal percentage for centers. The Yahoo! Search Sports Shortcuts also feature quick access to key player information, news, photos, game logs, and more.

Looking for other NBA players to try? Let’s not forget Luol Deng-that’s-a-lot-of-money-to-turn-down! I don’t blame him, he’s gotta feed his family, or perhaps try to help with Travis Henry’s.

Okay hockey fans, it’s your turn. As a Red Wings fan, I made sure that Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk are represented, along with Original Six veteran Chris Chelios. It just goes to show that these days, age doesn’t matter. But if you really want to know, just click through for the profile.

Finally, I’ll throw in an honorable mention to Mike Modano, who recently broke the record for goals scored by an American-born player. Congrats Mike, even if hockey in Texas is a meteorological abomination.

I hope you all find this feature useful and relevant in your everyday quest to prove your “fanhood.” Now that we’ve completed rolling out the shortcuts for the Fan-tastic Four, we’ll explore more opportunities to make Yahoo! Search the best darn sports search, period. Please let us know if you have any ideas/suggestions.

Ya-Bing Chu
Yahoo! Search

As we mentioned last week, some of the folks here at Yahoo! headed out to ad:Tech New York to take part in the industry discussions there. We thought we would share a few helpful tips gleaned from the SEO Workshop panel.

Moderated by Bruce Clay, the panel included Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, Sandor Marik, Director of Marketing at CondeNet and Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing and SEM/SEO at Fox Interactive Media.

The talk was sliced into five sub-categories — spiderability; duplicate content; linking strategies; fighting spam; and blended search, social marketing, behavioral search, and local issues — with an interactive Q&A after each. The result was a best practice talk, of sorts, on optimizing rankings. Here’s a look at the key topics discussed by the panel participants and a couple tips from our team that you may find helpful:

Spiderability — Refers to the ability for a spider to crawl and find your pages

• Low spiderability can result from poor site structure or login requirement for content access (spiders can’t log in); use of link based navigation and sitemaps submission helps spiders discover more URLs.
• Inform search engines of the most important pages on the site (and the less important) through sitemaps and the use of meta data such as priority and update frequency.
• More important content should be placed higher up in the directories; it’s easier for the spiders to discover easily found content than to discover deeply embedded content.
• Directories should be no more than 3 or 4 levels deep.
• Search engines care about how fast your site is; a slow server equals reduced spiderability.
• Use Robots-Nocontent to tell Slurp (Yahoo!’s spider) what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. Having crawlers focus on the main content results in proper matching and targeting which increases both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site.

Duplicate Content

• Try to have one unique URL for one page of content. Doing so should help you steer clear of lowered rankings due to duplicate pages and content.
• From a search engine perspective, static URLs are preferred when spidering a site. This does not mean that dynamic URls are not crawled. The cardinal rule is easy to find URLs; whether static or dynamic, they’ll be crawled before the others.
• Use Yahoo!’s Dynamic URL Rewriting feature that provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore; we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly. This will result in more efficient crawl, deeper site coverage and better site ranking due to reduced link fragmentation.

Linking Strategies

• Link to as many relevant pages as possible. Don’t be an island, but at the same time don’t link to sites that are not connected to you in any way; this can hurt search engine results. If you link to spam, your ranking could be severely hurt.
• The pages you link to are the pages your users will link to. Content is king. Create great content and ask yourself if you’re a fan of it and if you would link to it.
• Use descriptive anchor text when linking internally and externally. Use of contextual and descriptive anchor text can have a huge impact on site rankings.

Fighting Spam

• IP cloaking, keyword stuffing and other spam techniques can draw unwanted attention to your site and potentially reduce your rank or get you removed from specific search engines.
• Spamming can get you penalized, so even though the site may be retained in the search engine index, rankings may be negatively impacted.
• While there are a limited number of policemen out there, that doesn’t mean they’re not actively looking. There are both human and automated ways to detect spam.

Blended Search, Social marketing, Behavioral Search, and Local Issues

• Adding multimedia content with different formats has been working well, like with videos ranking in video searches. This multiplies ranking opportunities.
• Upload your videos to video service sites like YouTube, Yahoo! Video and MetaCafe for expanded results.
• Participating in vertical forums where sponsors answer questions can help build a reputation and create a relationship to sell products to your audience.

So, there you have it — a few high-level tips to help you get better rankings. If this post has sparked any questions, please feel free to leave your comments here and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

This week, five Yahoo!s will be speaking at the ad:Tech New York conference, “The Art of Conversation: Building Great Brands in the Digital Age.” The conference is focused on best practices for using digital media — such as SEO, SEM and a handful of social media platforms — for marketing and brand building.

Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, will participate in the SEO Workshop on Thursday to weigh in on a discussion of how webmasters can optimize their sites for search rankings.

Here’s a look at where you can find all of our executives in the Big Apple:

Wednesday
Video + Search + Contextual Targeting: Is the Holy Grail Upon Us?
12:15 — 1:15 p.m.
Panelist: Rebecca Paoletti, Director, Video Strategy

The Consumer Experience in a Multi-Platform World
12:15 — 1:15 p.m.
Panelist: Karin Gilford, VP and GM, Yahoo! Entertainment

Tactical Search: Local and Mobile Search Strategies
5:15 — 6:15 p.m.
Panelist: Michael Bayle, GM, Global Monetization, Yahoo! Connected Life

Thursday
SEO Workshop
11:15 a.m. — 12:15 p.m.
Panelist: Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

eCommerce Marketing: The Art of Customer Acquisition
1:45 — 2:45 p.m.
Panelist: Steven Feuling, Retail Category Development Officer

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Last week we announced that we were working on a fix to correct discrepancies in the page and inlink data counts. The good news is that the fix is now complete. You should see consistent page and inline counts in Site Explorer, whether you’re logged in or logged out.

Try a query in Site Explorer to confirm. As always, let us know your feedback.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search