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Microsoft has called it quits on their 3 month infatuation with Yahoo, withdrawing their official proposal today by snail mail.
From the official press release, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer states:
“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal”.
Wow. Now there’s a turn-up for the books. Yahoo’s advertising fling with Google last month must have really hurt for Balmer to abandon the pursuit. Kudos to Charlie for the heads up.
ADDED: Yahoo has officially responded to the rejection.
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Hi Kalena
As I’m rethinking about my page, I’ve become curious about something. Do people actually search for phrases such as “web design Gloucester” or do they for the most part just search for a page with those three words on it? (which if I understand things is what you get when you search without quotes).
Of course if I have the three words as a phrase either search hits it, but I’m having trouble making it as readable as I’d like using the concise phrases and I’m wondering if the sacrifice in readability is worth it?
Lastly, I wanted to be sure that if I have a key phrase such as “web design Gloucester” that the string “web design in Gloucester” matches. I seem to remember that “in” was a stop word ignored by Search Engines.
Steve
Hi Steve
I think you’ll find that most people will start a search using generic terms and then add qualifiers to help narrow down the results. So they might start with “web design companies” (no quotes) and then seeing billions of matches, they might try “web design companies Gloucester” or “web design Gloucester” (no quotes). I don’t really know too many searchers who use quotes unless they are advanced users or SEOs. So it really pays to try to get ranked for the non-quotes version of your target keyphrases.
You can achieve this by using the phrase in your text but including stop words so the copy is more readable. You should never have to sacrifice readability! Stop words are words like “the”, “and”, “in” etc that are mostly ignored by the search algorithm. So if your page has the sentence “we are one of the most popular web design companies in Gloucester” then search engines should rank your page high for the query “web design companies Gloucester” as they will ignore the word “in”.
The reverse also applies, where if a search query includes a stop word, engines will show pages that have either the shorter sentence included without the stop word/s or the longer one.
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Hi Kalena
We are looking to buy a search engine submission program. Can you make a recommendation? Here are a few we’ve heard work well. What do you think?
Thank you so much for your great newsletter!
Amy
Hi Amy
What do I think? I think you need to stop listening to people who tell you that you need to use search engine submission programs! You. Simply. Don’t. Need. Them.
It’s a a common misconception that you need to submit your site to search engines. Provided at least one site is linking to yours, all the major search engines will find your site as they crawl the web. In my opinion, many of the sites listed in those automatic submission programs are low quality Free For All (FFA) directories, considered bad neighborhoods by Google anyway.
That said, most major engines still provide an Add URL facility, or XML sitemap upload facility where you can manually submit your site for indexing. But do a manual check for your main site URL first, to see if any pages have been indexed. If they have, the search engine already knows about your site, so there is no need to submit it.
What I think you should do is obtain one-way links from high quality niche directories and popular sites in your own industry. There are really no shortcuts when it comes to gaining links. You’ll need to seek out sites that are relevant to your site and submit by hand. I recommend that you forget the auto submit products and put together a quality submission list tailored to your own site requirements. If you insist on using auto-submit products, be very selective about the sites you choose to send your link to and expect LOTS of email spam.
Oh and I’m glad you enjoy the newsletter!
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Just heard the news that Google is testing out a new feature in the search results pages. It’s a search box within the search results, directly below the site snippet. It allows searchers to search the entire site where the snippet has come from. Kind of like site search, but off-site. This only works for a few authority sites at the moment, including Amazon, NASA, Wikipedia and the New York Times, but apparently it will be rolled out on a larger scale shortly.
You can read more about it on the Google Blog.
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You all know by now that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s 45 billion dollar offer to acquire them and form a super search company (which I nicknamed Microhoo). The price was unanimously rejected by Yahoo’s Board of Directors and described as “substantially undervaluing the Yahoo brand”.
But what I found the most interesting development in the whole chain of events that unfolded last month was Google’s reaction. Check out their public statement on the potential acquisition. Not only does it use a scathing language against Microsoft, but it’s issued by a single person instead of the company as a whole: David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer. Here’s an extract:
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.
Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?
I may be completely off base here, but this suggests a couple of things to me:
1) Senior staff at Google weren’t comfortable enough with the content of the statement to release it as a standard-issue corporate press release.
2) Some staff at Google clearly have an axe to grind with Microsoft.
3) A potential Microsoft-Yahoo deal scares Google. A lot.
4) Google may approach (or may have already approached) Yahoo with a similar acquisition offer.
Maybe the threat of a Microsoft buyout of Yahoo will force Google’s hand. I am betting we’ll see some big moves from the big G this year.
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