Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Today, Yahoo announced an open API for their search results which allows third parties to edit results as they appear in Yahoo search listings. At first glance this may sound appealing in that meta data and additional links can now be provided to give the user additional information regarding restaurant listings, election information, product prices, etc. However, by allowing third parties to customize your search results, you run the risk of abuse as well as an unusable interface.

I’m not sure what safeguards are going to be put in place to avoid people from dumping unrelated information or banneriffic images into Yahoo’s results. And for more vague phrases such as “Chinese restaurant” or “lcd tv”, what would the search results look like if one website customizes their results to be product prices, while another has product ratings, while another has product information. The reason that people use these engines is that you get a top-down perspective of search results with very little clutter and then if they are enticing, you can drill down into them to get more information.

In this scenario, more information is brought up into the search results which may make certain results more appealing, but most likely the interface will become overloaded.

From an advertiser and media buyer perspective, this is not a welcome announcement. Whereas before, users would click into a site to learn more, now that information is being separated from the content site and given directly to the search engines. Who’s the big winner here? At least right now, the search engines. It means that less users are going to end up at your site and more users will simply get their information from search results. I know I previously wrote about the Ask.com interface and how it was better than Google’s, but I think all of these “integrations” are approaching a slippery slope where information is completely disassociated with the original content owners and the advertising platforms become the search providers.

I’m interested to see how it nets out, but as a content provider these days jockeying for search results, what choice to do you have?

Seriously, I thought the same thing, but this is awesome. Although, I don’t agree with the statement about SEM improving SEO, but that’s for another day - enjoy gangstaz.

First, to all my regular readers, sorry for the lapse in posts. It’s been really busy at work lately, and with the holidays, December just flew by. The good news is that I’m getting some help at work so hopefully I can post more regularly. Ok, let’s get to the fun stuff.

As Super Tuesday was yesterday, I figured I’d take a more presidential look at the candidates and how they comes across to the search engines. I’ve taken some time to evaluate Obama, Clinton, McCain, Huckabee, and Romney’s websites and the results are pretty interesting.

Here’s some initial stats in terms of pages indexed:

Obama - 1,470
Clinton - 4,930
McCain - 7,270
Romney - 4,700
Huckabee - 3,410

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