Industry Blog Posts

On Nodalities blog today, Paul Miller posts his podcast interview with Peter Mika, a SearchMonkey from Yahoo! Research. Peter's speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose May 18-22, so the two dove into what Peter will be presenting on as well as the innovation and direction behind SearchMonkey. Check out their conversation.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

We're sending a number of our top technologists up the road to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week. Among the 11 speakers across Yahoo!'s properties who'll be there, here's where you can find Ari Balogh, Yahoo! Chief Technology Officer, Neal Sample, Chief Architect of the Open Platform, and Dustin Whittle, Technical Yahoo! and symfony evangelist.

Wednesday, April 23rd
Time: 10:50 -- 11:40 a.m.
Location: 2nd Level Lobby
Topic: A Symfony Answer
Yahoo!: Dustin Whittle

Dustin will discuss how to work with open source tools to create a complete framework (PHP, JS, CSS) for the enterprise. He'll use his experience redeveloping Yahoo! Answers with symfony and Yahoo! User Interface libraries as a case study.

Thursday, April 24th
Time: 10 -- 10:15 a.m.
Location: 3rd Level Keynote Ballroom
Topic: Yahoo! and Open Platforms
Yahoo!: Ari Balogh

Ari, Yahoo!'s new CTO, will give a 15-minute keynote presentation on Yahoo! and open platforms.

Friday, April 25th
Time: 1:30 -- 2:20 p.m.
Location: Expo Hall
Topic: Yahoo! and Open Platforms -- A Deeper Dive
Yahoo!: Neal Sample

Neal will expand on Ari's keynote by giving a deeper dive into Yahoo! and open platforms.

If you can't attend the presentations, please feel free to stop by our Yahoo! Developer Network booth (#901) in the Expo Hall. Yahoo! Search, along with a number of other product teams, will be on hand to answer questions and do demos of our latest products.

Yahoo! Search Blog

The largest annual consumer technology show in the world is happening next week and Yahoo! is in on the Las Vegas action. Yodel Anecdotal is covering Yahoo!'s presence at the show, including Jerry Yang's talk on the evolution of Internet technology and its impact on consumer technology products.

And, if you've stayed close to Yahoo! oneSearch-related news in the past, don't hesitate to stop by Yahoo!'s tent at the Central Plaza (CP3). You'll be able to demo the company's mobile products and speak with other representatives.

Good luck in Las Vegas...

Yahoo! Search Blog team

We saw, we spoke, we sipped cocktails, and now that all is said and done, this year's WebmasterWorld conference in Las Vegas was full of industry hot buttons, interesting debates and stand-out keynotes. Here's a snapshot of what I took away from the event:

Key Conference Theme
Walking around the conference, one key theme that really caught my attention was the discussion of social media as it relates to marketing and search. With social media such as Digg.com and blogs proliferating, digital marketers now have the choice to optimize for organic/PPC listings or use social media to generate traffic. Their viral effect, in particular, was discussed in great detail throughout the event as was the need for modern SEOs to consider developing social media campaigns, using social widgets and creating videos and images as ways to get the Web to talk about their sites.

Key Debate
There was an interesting debate between Gord Hotchkiss and Greg Boser on the meaning and significance of universal search, particularly with regard to which experience is better -- integrating images and videos throughout the search results page or using clean separation of images, videos and traditional web results. SEOing for universal search can be a challenge, as the space is a moving target and lacks a steady definition.

Noteworthy Keynote
I thought that Richard Rosenblatt's keynote on Wednesday delivered sound insight. According to Richard, most content online today is about sports, politics, news, and other common topics, leaving long tail topics underserved. He emphasized that there is significant demand for quality content in the long tail and therefore an unaddressed opportunity to create content and capitalize on the monetization opportunities. Susan Esparza at Bruce Clay, Inc. lived blogged from the address, where Richard revealed, "The old model was about owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don't care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail."

Another panel that received some industry attention was "SEO and Big Search" with Dave Roth, Yahoo!'s Director of Search Engine Marketing, and his counterparts at AOL and Google. Tamar Weinberg at Search Engine Roundtable recaps his discussion of how to do SEO and SEM at a place like Yahoo!.

Industry Recaps
With a slew of industry influencers live blogging from the event, there's already been a number of panel recaps. Check out Search Engine Roundtable for more detailed information. They list both WebmasterWorld and SES Chicago panels and give readers a breakdown of their top five stories across both conferences by pageviews.

Overall, the discussions that took place at WebmasterWorld really brought a number of significant shifts in effective SEO to the forefront. Social media is not only impacting and changing our culture, but also the way in which SEO can and should be done. As social media continues to evolve and penetrate the search and marketing industry, I anticipate that optimizing for it will be an increasingly critically component of the SEO mix.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

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

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

Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp are heading to New York next week for SMX Social Media, where they'll be diving into a Q&A-style keynote on the trends in social media and where the future may be heading. To kick-off the keynote, Danny Sullivan's starting the session with some focused questions and he's tapped his readers at Sphinn for their thoughts. Check out his post and the questions he's already generated.

If you've got any burning social bookmarking questions, share your two cents on Danny's blog and help drive the discussion on Tuesday.

Yahoo! Search Blog

Heading into the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose last week, I'd been at Yahoo! just over a week. The four-day summer event was a welcome respite to my new gig and certainly to some of my colleagues who were beginning to feel a little stuffed in their cubes and meeting rooms. We all headed down to the San Jose Convention Center to connect with our users, share the hot trends in the industry and learn a thing or two from the experts in the field. My first SES experience was pretty successful overall, so I thought I'd share a few takeaways for those who couldn't make it...

Memorable Delivery
Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a resident authority on advanced problems with frames, dynamic pages, Flash, cloaking, etc., but it was his wry humor and flamboyant delivery of search engine fundamentals (content, link and spiders) that roused even the most avid snoozers at the "Fun with Dynamic Web Sites" panel on Tuesday.

Trend That Piqued My Interest
Personalization and Web 2.0
P10n will change the way search engines rank the results and users look at them.

• Jonathan Mendez's visual research data in "Personalization, User Data & Search" on Monday showed user scanning is more scattered with personalized results and varies with chunking. Also, link popularity and the emergence of thematic "buzz" sites greatly extend the role of links in SEO. Check out Online Marketing Blog for more details.
• Vanessa Fox and Amit Kumar in the Web 2.0 session on Wednesday revealed that, while the user generated content and community sharing are the hallmarks of Web 2.0, AJAX (link sharing problem) or content design frameworks like CSS may not always be the right choice as they can be search engine unfriendly.

Standout Sessions
Sessions like "Organic Listings" and "Meet the Crawlers" moderated by Danny Sullivan, aimed to brainstorm the unresolved questions in the SEO community: copyright recognition, content copying, crawl frequency, and duplicate content problem. While there is no clear panacea in the continuously evolving world of search engines and web technologies, there are some common ways to troubleshoot these problems: reviewing Robots.txt regularly and using Site Explorer, Sitemap and the Dynamic Urls tab in Site Explorer.

Overall, the conference was quite the experience for a Yahoo! first-timer. I had the chance to meet several of you as we flitted across the main hall and hung around the various coffee tables and long restroom queues. I'd like to keep the conversation going, so hope to see you at another industry event soon.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search