If you thought the whole Yahoo! - Microsoft saga was over, guess again. Yahoo! shareholders are now suing Yahoo! for neglecting to take into account the company’s main responsibility, looking out for the shareholders. It seems Microsoft will have Yahoo! all to itself pretty soon.

This is one of the most basic questions that SEO professionals face on a day-to-day basis. For some reason, executives and non-technical managers believe that manually submitting sites is one of the criteria that enables you to get ranked higher on search engines. That is not true, however. You are not going to get brownie points for submitting a URL to search engines manually. But should you?

Based on my experience, it is always better to wait for crawlers to find your site by themselves. If you are optimizing your site for search engines by adding content and gaining valuable incoming links to your pages, then crawlers should be able to find your site and index it unless you are doing something nasty such as faking traffic or incoming links to your site. Technically, you shouldn’t have to submit your site to engines manually. But if 3-6 months have gone by and you are not still indexed by search engines, then it is reasonable to try manual URL submission. Having said that, you don’t want to resubmit your site for a couple of months though. I have heard stories about people who have gotten banned for submitting their sites a bunch of times in a matter of few days. So it is possibly true that you can get banned for going extreme on a search engine. If search engines can’t find your site, the best bet is to check what you are doing wrong and not what they are doing wrong. And as always, SEO requires some patience so don’t jump your guns.

According to the latest report from IAB, the online ad revenue has grown by 25% since last year (by $4.2 bn). That is lower than the previous number, but still is very significant. Another significant fact here is online ad revenue is only about 10% of the total all U.S. ad spending, which means there are good days ahead of Google and their Adwords program. Adwords is a true cash cow for Google, and they have relatively dominant in that market. I am sure Microsoft + Yahoo will challenge them for those dollars but still the future looks good for ad servers such as Google.

This is the question of questions. If you pick up any SEO book, let’s say search engine optimization for dummies, you’ll find out that almost every SEO author gives a huge importance to the text content on your page. So it’s true that you will have trouble getting ranked if your site is only in Flash or other non-textual formats. However, some SEOs recommend having at least 200 words of text on each page to get ranked well on search engines. That is certainly not true. 200 is a nice number, but you can’t tell me that there is an If/Else statement in search engine algorithms that bumps you up if you have more than 200 words on your page. Following a formula is exactly what kills you in a highly competitive SEO environment. Just think about it. If you and your competitors are all doing the same things, then what’s to say that they are not going to be ranked above you. So If your page has only 100 words, it doesn’t mean that you are definitely going to get outranked by others with more text. I have personally helped rank sites that have less than 100 words of text on them. I guess I could’ve achieved the same result with 200 words, but why add unnecessary words when I don’t need them. Here is my rule: if it doesn’t add value, don’t write it.

Finally, there is a book out there that discusses how one can effectively manage online reputation manages for all kinds of businesses on the net. ORM is certainly a hot word right now as many are claiming to be experts in online reputation management without really having a proof for that claim, but with Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, you can learn how to use the best practices out there to tackle the most complex ORM problems. This book is out already on Amazon but is limited and is shipped on a first come, first served basis.

Can Jerry Yang really save Yahoo! from demise? Well, if he thought he could do it just because he was one of the founders, then he is mistaken. Pension funds are now aiming to sue Yahoo! for neglecting its responsibility to its stakeholders to maximize their investment value. I personally prefer Yahoo! to join Google than Microsoft (even though it’s impossible) but Jerry needs to accept the fact. It’s over for Yahoo!

Believe it or not, Domainers are now becoming like real estate moguls as they are practically registering every name under the sun. Everyone dreams of selling a cool domain name such as iPhone.com or CreditCards.com for millions. Not to forget that many registrars are using the shady practice of domain-hogging in order to get your business [for those of you not familiar with the concept of domain-hogging, it is the practice used by a few registrars to keep you from going to their competitors. Basically, when you search for a domain name, and it turns out that it's available, you either choose to buy it or wait for a couple of days. Domain registrars will register the domain automatically if you don't buy it. That way you can only buy it from them should you change your mind.]  But is the whole domaining phenomenon helping or hurting us consumers?
(more…)

In an effort to give Yahoo! employees some encouragement to stay with the company throughout these tough times, Yang has just introduced a severance package that will give at least 4 months of salary to employees who are fired by Microsoft. But Yang wouldn’t be satisfied with 4 months as he and his buddies will be getting 24 months worth of salary in case they are fired (I wonder why Microsoft should keep this guy any way). So he will be getting more money than most of us, our kids, and our grand kids will make in their lifetimes. I guess he deserves it after bringing Yahoo! to where it is now, doesn’t he?

I always get surprised when I hear companies joke about their lack of analytics resources. In today’s world, if you want to get ahead, you need to be ready to “outanalyze” your rivals. I know companies track things such as conversions, clickthroughs, CTR, and so on. But there are tons of other things to analyze to find out what keywords are more effective and how to have better converting campaigns.

I have rarely seen companies that choose to analyze their conversion latency. In other words, you get people to your site using a generic term. Do people actually apply or do they just bounce? How about more specific terms? If you analyze the time that it takes to get a first time visitor all the way to the approval you can find out how to deal with 1st time users better in the future. For instance, if a keywords has a high conversion latency and non-conversion rate, then you know that is a “problem” keyword. On the other hand, a keyword converts often and has a short conversion latency is a good keyword to have. I think the challenge would be to decide between low latency - low conversion and high latency - high conversion keywords. But in most cases, either your latency is so high that offsets the advantages of the high converting keyword or it’s high enough that you can take it over a Low L- Low C keyword.

Many companies don’t even bother doing this kind of analysis. But if you don’t do this type of analysis, aren’t you effectively flying blind?

Basically to put it clearly on the table, Yahoo! is asking its stockholders to hold on to their pants as long as possible. Yahoo! is under severe pressure from Microsoft and investors to turn its fortunes around. The fact that a partnership with News Corps is on the cards shows how desperate poor Jerry has gotten. Somehow I believe this is to make Microsoft increase its bid to $35-40 but I wouldn’t put it past Jerry to try everything and anything possible to save his creation