I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition.

The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects search results and paid search campaigns (not other services such as Yahoo/Hotmail mail, Yahoo/Live log-ins etc).

After the transition, all organic and paid search results on Yahoo and Bing displayed will come from Microsoft. Presentation of the results may differ, but rank and ad order will appear the same in search results for both.

Once complete, the plan is to use the AdCenter interface to manage and view the performance of ads running on Yahoo and Bing with a single bid strategy across both engines. There was a good deal of discussion about  improvements being made to that AdCenter desktop to provide better support and performance for very large campaigns. The interface will have improved import/export capabilities.

Yahoo users will see new features including.

• Exact, Phrase, and Broad (formerly advanced) match options
• Match types will not apply to negatives (AdCenter is adding ability to have more Negatives)
• Separate bidding for misspellings, plural, and singular terms
• Create custom reports, improved keyword tools
• Content Network support
• 30 character headline drops to 25 (!)
• Microsoft’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion method
• A search query report will be available.
• No decision yet on how Yahoo conversion tracking will be migrated/supported, but it sounded like Microsoft conversion codes will be the norm going forward.
• Bidding/Trademark policies will be merged into a single policy.

The transition sounded somewhat like the transition from Overture to Yahoo Marketing. If you already have campaigns running in Yahoo (Panama), you won’t be forced to migrate (at least not immediately). Once Panama users migrate their accounts to the AdCenter, any accumulated conversion history from old campaigns will be lost.

More information at:

• http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/02/18/search-alliance/
• http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US

SEM Huntsville adcenter, AdCenter Desktop Beta, bing, microhoo, microsoft, yahoo marketing

There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).

The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same?  Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www  issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.

The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:

• www.mywebsite.com/january 2009/search-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/seo-tag/serach-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/author-allen/serach-engine-optimization

 Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:

• www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization/sessionid=123

Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.  

Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relavency than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each. 

To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.

So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.

Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox  at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537 

Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.

SEO Huntsville Canonical, google, incoming links, microsoft, SEO Huntsville, Yahoo