Yahoo Local

Finally, Yahoo SearchMonkey is Useful

on August 1st, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

I was at SMX West earlier this year when Yahoo announced SearchMonkey, which is a way for companies to add and manipulate data to listings in the search engine results. Before today this was nowhere near useful, because users would have to add the application before being able to see any of the changes or additional info. Now, Yahoo has announced they will have Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and LinkedIn automatically “installed” so all users will see them.

The great thing about this is a local business can have even their regular site listing stand out by having reviews, by being networked, etc. and now it will show up for all users. The only con to SearchMonkey is you might never have Yahoo turn your application on by default, and getting users to actually install yours is probably not worth your while.

Despite trying a ton of queries, I haven’t seen any of the “SearchMonkey results” show up yet, but I’ll keep querying.

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Yahoo! Opens Up about Yahoo! Local

on March 27th, 2008 by Michael D Jensen

One of the leading local search sites is Yahoo! Local. Back in February 2008 at a search marketing conference, SMX, in Santa Clara, CA, a speaker from Yahoo! discussing blended (universal) search mentioned that the ratings and reviews don’t have an impact on the listings that showed up. This sparked quite a discussion which led to Yahoo! clarifying that ratings, not customer review text, are considered in the rankings of local listings.

Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com was at the forefront of the discussion, and was able to get an interview with the Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Local, Brian Gil. It’s a bit long, so I’ve condensed it to what the take-home message really was, because it was insightful.

1) Ratings can affect rankings in Yahoo! Local searches, but not the review text.

2) The text of your listing with Yahoo! will affect searches, and there is a definite opportunity in the long tail keywords.

3) Your website may affect your ranking, but it depends on the context. Yahoo! says it will not consider your website text when Yahoo! “requires higher precision”. What that means I’m not sure, but perhaps it means in more competitive spaces it will consider it? I think we need a clarification from Matt McGee.

4) Are ratings and reviews that important? Not as important as your listing, but they will definitely be important going forward. Don’t put all your focus on the customer reviews, but don’t neglect them.

5) Local Shortcut appears in the main search engine when Yahoo! has confidence that that is the user’s intent. [financial planner in Portland] triggers the Local Shortcut, but not [financial planner Portland].

6) Yahoo! Yellow Pages will remain, it services a different audience than Yahoo! Local. Its used more for browsing and lookup, while Yahoo! Local is for search.

7) Events through Upcoming.org will be integrated, as well as Flickr localized images.

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