Common Sense eCommerce

Morale must be pretty low at Yahoo! these days. Takeover bids, job cuts, and desperate measures - like pairing with Google for ad serving - make it seem like dark days for the internet pioneer company. Very few people are talking about Yahoo! stores in this deal. Yahoo! Stores are a well oiled ecommerce engine that few other companies can match. Google has nothing like them and neither does Microsoft. Microsoft sort of tried that a few years ago with their Microsoft Online Small Business Services but it went nowhere.

Yahoo! Stores provide a sizeable chunk of the niche ecommerce market - everything from foam earplugs to fishing tackle to piano sheet music to wedding favors. It would seem that this would provide value to Microsoft if they do indeed end up acquiring Yahoo! As far as I know, Yahoo! is the single largest eCommerce hosting provider and that’s got to count for something. If MS does take over will they recognize that as value or will they shutter it like they did with their Online Small Business Services?

For Yahoo, clock ticks down to Microsoft deadline

I had always thought of Yahoo! as a major playa in the internet search marketing area. How odd they are fighting for survival right now. Attempting to deflect Microsoft’s takeover, which is becoming increasingly hostile, Yahoo! has taken to a Google partnership for ad serving - on a ‘test’ basis. How ironic that just a few short years ago, the shoe was on the other foot. Google, when Adwords was still in its infancy was serving up Yahoo ads (then known as Overture).

I am no industry analyst, but I see this as weak move on Yahoo’s part. Didn’t Yahoo! just spend a bunch of money and effort on upgrading their own advertising platform? Panama? Hmmm, seems like Yahoo! is chalking up the ‘throw-aways’ lately. Does anyone remember Yahoo 360? How they hyped that up and then just tossed it asunder?

Now there are rumors bubbling about Yahoo! buying AOL. Talk about throw-aways! Is AOL anything other that a relic of a different era with perhaps a mixed brand reputation? These seem like the actions of a desperate company and it’s sad to see Yahoo! in this light. At any rate, it’s an interesting story to watch unfold.

Yahoo to test use of Google’s search ad service

Yahoo Is Close to Combining With AOL

The big buzz in eCommerce this week is the Microsoft proposed acquisition of Yahoo! If you haven’t read about it, you’ve not been reading the news, but here is the story. 

How to acquire a company that doesn’t want to be acquired? Make them an offer they can’t refuse and wave the money in the front of the investor’s faces so the board can’t say no. In reality, this deal seems to make a lot of sense given the fact that Yahoo’s future is somewhat uncertain as a media company. Microsoft, not happy with their long standing 3rd place status in the search engine media market will benefit. So it looks like a win win.

Here is a MarketWatch article that sounds the alarm about the culture difference between Microsoft and Yahoo! Indeed, Microsoft is not a media company like Yahoo!, rather, they’re a software company with a media division. The article draws up the example of the AOL / Time Warner merger a number of years ago. That turned out to be a culture clash of gargantuous proportions. I’m not sure the MS/Yahoo will be quite that bad, but it’s something to consider.

And then there’s that pesky issue of the Brand. Will Microsoft keep the Yahoo! name? Will they drop that annoying “!” at the end?

Tags: yahoo, microsoft, Yahoo Microsoft, Microsoft Yahoo Acquisition

The other day, everyone probably noticed that Google shifted their links line-up to the upper left corner of the screen from the center of the screen. Another not so obvious change is that they eliminated the ‘even more’ choice from the ‘more’ option.

As of this writing, these are the options you get:

The old Google ‘more’ gave you these choices:

Note that you could click ‘even more’ to get to their whole suite of products. Looks like they’ve eliminated the ‘even more’ thing. Needless to say, a lot of things are missing from their new ‘more’ list. But most notably is the Directory (ODP aka The Open Directory Project).

Could it be that Google finally realizes that the ODP is not worthy of front page exposure or linkage? After all, who actually uses directories these days? The ODP has long been criticized for being slow, unwieldy, and not providing the quality that was part of its original goal.

It wasn’t too long ago that Google had the ODP Directory link among their 4 main links below their name. My how times have changed! Now to be fair, there are plenty of other products left off the list from the main page, but for some reason, the ODP/Directory link stands out the most.

You can still get to the entire list of products via some of the product screens (like Blog Search), but I have a feeling Google hasn’t gotten around to changing them yet. The other way to get to the entire list is to log into your Google account and click “My Account”. Under the section “Try something new” is a link to ‘more’ that goes to all their products.

But bottom line, there is no longer an indirect link from the home page to the ODP/Directory and certain other products - although you can certainly ‘Google’ them.

Tags: Google Home Page, Google Products, Google Directory, Google ODP Link

I did a post over on my Home Business blog about Yahoo! and their new Keyword Research Tool which is supposed to replace the old Overture Keyword Tool. Difference is, this one has only relative indicators which puts Yahoo! on par with Google and MSN. Why do these Search Engines not want to reveal the numbers behind each keyword?

I can think of two possible reasons. The first is the fact that such data is considered proprietary and highly secret. So I would ask: if they tell us that 240,000 searches were done for ‘ebay home business’ last month on their network, is that such a big secret? Perhaps it should be something they could charge for. I for one, would be happy to pay for Google’s quantitative search data.

A second reason I can think is that it’s too difficult and perhaps not worth their trouble. Considering all the disparate data centers these Search Engines maintain, it might a big task to aggregate all that data on every possible keyword.  It seems that Yahoo Overture did it, although their data points were sometimes called into question by many SEOs.

So that leaves us with WordTracker which does still give us quantitative search data. Although their quantitative data is also proprietary and has been drawn into question. In the meantime, I guess we have to think in relative terms when doing keyword research.

Tags: Yahoo! Search Marketing, Overture Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Keyword Research

While Amazon has never really mastered the online auction market as eBay has, they have mastered the fixed price market in a way that eBay obviously has not. eBay still does not appear to know exactly what they want to do with their stores even though they have been online since around 2001. Remember the ‘reset the marketplace’ debacle last year? And there is buzz that eBay is getting to ‘reset the marketplace’ yet again.

If you’re looking for an alternative to eBay stores, consider an Amazon Webstore. Like eBay stores, Amazon Webstores are ‘connected’ to Amazon, but you don’t get any traffic from Amazon. The ‘connection’ is a link from your Seller Marketplace store. That will get you indexed by the search engine spiders but not much else. That part is pretty similar to eBay stores where you get a built-in link on your user page to your store. Few people click on it, but the search engines will crawl it.

The big difference in the Amazon Webstores is that you use your own URL and it’s not a sub-domain off the main URL like eBay is. So for example, if your store is “FauxFloralArrangements”, it would look like this on eBay:

http://stores.ebay.com/fauxfloralarrangements

However it would look like this as an Amazon Webstore:

http://www.fauxfloralarrangements.com

(assuming of course, you have secured the domain name).

That’s a huge difference from the perspective of change management. If you decided to move on to another platform, all the links you’ve built with an eBay store will go away. But with the Amazon Webstore, you supply and keep the domain. That means you can take it with you if you decide you don’t want to be an Amazon Webstore any longer and your links will follow (unless you’ve done deep linking).

Some other factoids about Amazon Webstores. Amazon acts as the shopping cart for your transactions just as eBay does. Amazon charges 7% which covers the whole transaction. eBay charges 10% of the first 25 dollars and 7% after that. But then you must also add in the PayPal transaction for another 3 percent. Amazon basic monthly hosting fee is flat: $60.00. So it’s more on the monthly hosting side, but has cost savings on the transaction side.

Another plus side to Amazon Webstores is that you can use your Amazon affiliate account there. In other words, you can setup things in your Amazon Webstore that you are just promoting as an affiliate and they show right along with your other ‘inventory’.

A down side is that there is no apparent way to promote your Amazon Webstore from other Amazon venues like the Seller Marketplace. My rep tells me that may be planned for the future, but for now, you have to get your traffic by other means. But there are indeed other means - like Pay Per Action for example.

You can read about Amazon Webstores at their page (link here).

Tags: Amazon Webstore, eBay Store, Selling on Amazon, Selling on eBay

I have this drop ship site (call it site A) which used to be on the first page on Yahoo for its main keyword. It was in the top 5 sometimes as high as 3. Earlier this year, it took a tumble in the rankings. Not just a little slip, but a major tumble. It’s been fluctuating between the 50 and 65 spots - in other words, they did ‘the Donald’ on my site (for that keyword).I know the reason for the tumble was their January Algo update. But what I don’t know is how to get it back up to page 1. Site A for that keyword ranks #4 on MSN and is currently #12 on Google with an occasional bump to 9 or 10.

I have a theory about Yahoo ranking - completely unfounded, but rumors like this have been floating around for years so I may as well add to them. You have to spend money with Yahoo to rank well with Yahoo.

The competitor for Site A is now in #1 on Yahoo - they are a Yahoo store, my Site A is not hosted on Yahoo. Ahem. Site B (another drop ship site of mine) is not a Yahoo store, but I did plunk down the $300 per year to get it into the Yahoo Directory. It ranks better now than before January for its top keyword - #5 on Yahoo. Cough.

So there you have it folks - the unofficial Frank Ross theory of Yahoo’s Search Algo. Seriously, I suppose I should consider plunking down the $300 for a Yahoo directory listing for Site A. That may bump it up to the first page of Google and may help Yahoo see fit to raise it back to its former prominence.

Google recently announced a ‘Pay Per Action’ option to tag along with their Adwords program. Basically it means you (the advertiser) only pays when the specified action is taken. That action could be a sale, a newsletter sign-up and so on.

Such ads will only be shown across Google’s Adsense content network, but nevertheless, it creates somewhat of an advertiser’s dream: Only pay for the advertising when you get the desired action! Now that’s Common Sense eCommerce.

Details on the program are sparse at this point (like we don’t know the costs), but the Google press release can be found here. It is also rolled out in limited beta which means ‘by invite’. You can apply to be part of their beta program here. (You must have an Adwords account).

In general, this sounds very good, but you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true! I suspect for something like this to work for Google, the costs may be quite high.

That aside, I have seen two different colleagues reference this in light of eBay stores - Randy Smythe and Phil Dunn. With eBay seeming to want to discourage eBay stores, this would be a good way to get out on the web and do business off eBay. If Adwords isn’t working for you anymore, maybe give this a try.

Tags: Google Pay-Per-Action, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Per-Per-Click

Remember when the Open Directory Project (ODP) was the end-all for valuable inbound links? Times have certainly changed. Nowadays, they are mostly a reflection of better days. Times when directories were the search engine of choice. If you try to submit your site you get this message:

Service Temporarily Unavailable - We apologize for the inconvenience while we resolve technical problems. Please check back in a day or two.

Day or two? A forum post from 11/26/06 (link here) - as well as other things I’ve read - suggests that the problem has persisted for longer than just a few days. In fact, I first tried this last week and have tried off and on over the past few days. I would say ODP (aka DMOZ) is simply a relic of times past and may never come back.

Furthermore, there is evidence of corruption in the ranks. Remember Ana Thema? The so-called corrupt DMOZ editor who started a blog call Corrupt DMOZ Editor (link here) - which has not been posted in for nearly 10 months.  And then there was the DMOZ editor who got exposed for taking money for putting up listings (link here). Whether those two are the same I have no idea.

But the question remains as to why search engines still give credence to ODP as an important resource. Google for example, still shows a ToolBar page rank of 8 associated with it and the ToolBar page rank was recently updated as I understand. I suspect ODP should be relegated to the internet archive and just be seen as a page from the book of internet history. At the very least, it is not living up to one of its main goals:

The ODP is an Open Source inspired initiative created and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The following is a social contract that we created to reflect Netscape’s commitment to the Web community to keep the ODP a free and open resource…

ODP … is anyone home?

Tags: Open Directory Project, ODP, ODP Problems, ODP Corruption, ODP Failure, DMOZ Problems, DMOZ Corruption

When we talk about Google, everyone thinks about Google the search engine. But what about their other products? For some time, it seemed that Google was just putting out product after product at a dizzying rate. Some were in beta, some were successful, and some were not. They still put out interesting products, but it’s beginning to look like they may be focusing on fine tuning the things that work well and getting rid of those things that are not so successful.

Google News recently came out of what seemed like a very long beta status. It now includes news archive searches (although you have to pay to actually see the content on a lot of those search results). The Google News is a very refined and successful product.

Orkut was a ‘not so successful’ product. It was supposed to be an answer to MySpace in the social networking arena, but apparently was only popular among certain undesirable elements. It created a public relations nightmare for Google in Brazil and India. Now it’s no longer shown on their page of Google products although the Orkut website is still live.

The ‘Google Base’ just celebrated it’s one year anniversary. Base is a product that’s still developing and showing growing promise with integration to other products.

Google shows an amazing amount of flexibility for such a large company. The ability to quickly ditch markets that aren’t performing well and build up on ones that do, is easier for smaller business. But Google seems to do a good job of emulating this core small business strategy.

Tags: Google Products, Google Branding, Google Base, Google News, Google Orkut

Back in the day, well not too long ago, link exchanges were all the rage.  You link to me, I’ll link to you.  The online version of reciprocal back-scratching, each link was supposed to benefit the linkee with an inbound link.

It was such a rage that software packages were built around the concept. Software like SEO Elite that would manage this network of reciprocal links for you. (SEO Elite has value beyond that, thankfully).

But with each successive Google update, these link arrangements became more and more suspect.  I can remember as early as February of 2005 hearing warning sounds coming from SEO professionals about these kinds of arrangements.  There was even some anecdotal evidence that these link swap arrangements can penalize your rankings.

Yet, it amazes me that I continue to get ‘link exchange’ requests on my eCommerce sites.  I have long since discontinued the ‘links’ email address and now I get the requests in the customer service and info mailboxes.  The senders explain to me how much the link exchange will benefit my site.

Mounting evidence tells me that these are no longer a good idea, except perhaps in the case where the two sites are relevant.  Of course ‘relevant’ is awfully subjective, so even that needs to be carefully studied.   I have a form email for these requestors now that politely says we no longer engage in link exchange arrangements. 

Does anyone actually think these are a good idea anymore?

Tags: Reciprocal Links, Link Exchange, Link Swapping,

Anyone who has ever tried to get into Google’s ranking, especially on the first page, knows that it takes a while to get there.  How does that affect relevancy for the end user?  In many cases, Google results are just what the user ordered but in other cases they might seem old, outdated, or just non relevant. 

The reason it takes some time to get to the top of Google’s rankings is due to several factors.  One is that Google has what’s called an ‘aging delay’ in place for most sites.  That means you can’t put up a site and expect it to jump to the top of the search results immediately.  Many experts think this delay can penalize new sites for up to year.  This delay is necessary to ensure the integrity of their results - otherwise any new spam sites could come along and pop right into the first page of the results.

But how does this affect the end user experience?  If the user is looking for fixed information, such as information about the Reagan presidency, the aging delay will probably not effect the result. But if the user is looking for more recent information, for example about certain new members of congress or new congressional impact plans due to the recent US election, it might be a different story.  The user can of course, check the Google news, but the standard search may not give them what they want.

If you have ever tried to search for something on Google and gotten frustrated with their results, try MSN.  MSN seems to rely on other methods to filter out spam sites and does not seem to penalize new sites.   So when you are searching for fresh content, try MSN as an alternate to Google.

Tags: Google Results, MSN Search

Everyone is buzzing about Google’s purchase of YouTube this week. So I may as well add my 2 cents to the web echo chamber. When I first heard the news (or as it was first reported: a rumor), I thought - hmm don’t they already have their own video system (Google Video) in place?

Not only do they have Google Video in place, but it occupies one of the cherished front page slots on the Google home page. Google has also spent a lot of time and money promoting Google Video. It does essentially the same thing as YouTube.

Or does it? Google Video was not one of their stunning successes. It simply has not drawn the video community the way YouTube has. According to this article at ZD Net, it has a 10 percent share. Not bad I guess, unless you’re Google.

They may have seen 10% share as a failure. They probably realized Google Video was never going to compete with the huge community of YouTube. So in buying YouTube they acknowledge (although not publicly) that their Google Video was well…not so successful.

A lesson in taking a ‘failure’ and turning it around. Now Google has gone from 10% share to almost 70% and essentially owns the online Video market. Now that is yet more to make Microsoft and Yahoo say “I wish we’d thought of that!”.

– Frank Ross