How Yahoo Blew It
Your probably wondering what did Yahoo blow up, this was the title of an interesting article on wirednews that Rand linked to in his last post, I am going to post the same interesting findings from the article that Rand posted since it is the most interesting part of the article:
Semel has been Yahoo’s CEO for nearly six years, yet he has never acquired an intuitive sense of the company’s plumbing. He understands how to do deals and partnerships, he gets how to market Yahoo’s brand, and he knows how to tap Yahoo’s giant user base to sell brand advertising to corporations. But the challenges of integrating two giant computer systems or redesigning a database or redoing a user interface? Many who have met with him at Yahoo say he still doesn’t know the right questions to ask about technology. “Terry could never pound the table and say, ‘This is where we need to go, guys,’” one former Yahoo executive says. “On those subjects, he always had to have someone next to him explaining why it was important.” One could have made a convincing argument two years ago that such deep technical knowledge didn’t matter much. But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.
Rand from SEOMoz continues to mention interesting points in his post about why he thinks Google became a bigger brand than Yahoo:
- User interface
Google’s clean UI was revolutionary and attractive; it’s still one of the elements consumers cite most about their use of the engine. - Purity of function
Google’s concentration on search (at least in the early years) made them first and foremost a search engine in people’s mind. Yahoo! was a directory, a portal, an email service, etc. and, oh yeah, also an engine. - Appeal to Geeks
Google appealed to tech geeks - the people who set the home pages on computers around corporate offices and at home for Grandma. When thousands of influencers in a field become obsessed with a product, it achieves mass popularity (just look at Apple). - Viral spread
Google’s marketing was nearly invisible at a time when invisible, viral marketing was being embraced by consumers, particularly those in the web world. - Early quality advantage
Perhaps no single factor is of greater import - Google’s early lead in quality was so large that switching to Google was an obvious choice. In my opinion, this was Yahoo!’s biggest failure - letting Google return more relevant results. The funny part - I honestly can’t say whether senior management was responsible for or could have controlled this factor. It could be that Google simply had a few people with better ideas and all the hiring and R&D in the world couldn’t have saved Yahoo!. - Media obsession
Being a media darling made Google incredibly well placed to get early interest from even the stodgiest of users. And, with no need to market or advertise (since press releases on the average consistency of Googlers snot got more coverage than a major media play from Yahoo!), Google could spend that money in R&D to continue their edge.
I can only say that I agree with Rand’s thoughts, Google did allot of correct steps towards creating the giant they are now, while Yahoo! did lots of big mistakes in my opinion.
Anyhow, all of you probably know that there was a Google PR update going last week, this update was particularly interesting to watch compared to other updates, 1st of all, it took longer than any of the previous updates took to happen, and the results were strange and it seems that i am not the only one that has the same thoughts, I did somewhat of a small experiment myself, i linked to a new site of mine from PR6 and PR7 pages only a month or so before the PR update, and the results came back just like I expected, no PR increase for that site at all, it seems that Google is now effectively denies a website any PR value unless the links your getting stay on those pages longer than a month (not sure of the time exactly)
I’ve been mainly working for the past 2 weeks on project F, its almost done now, needs a bit more work and it should be ready to launch, hopefully ill be able to share some good news about it in the coming week, the main developer I am using for the project was experiencing internet problems and this lead to a bit more delay, this sort of thing is expected when dealing with freelancers, I guess everyone using freelancers is used to this.
I know I haven’t been sharing lots of personal project news that I usually used to share and I apologize for that, I’ll do my best to write a post to sum up everything that has been going on for the past month as far as my websites are concerned.
btw shoemoney made a nice post about the wordpress plugins he usually uses, I’ve had the Akismet plugin added in my plugins folder but never installed it, its not installed and hopefully it will solve the blog spam issue I’ve been bombarded with for the past months.
I’ve read about some sites adding the sitemaps and then losing their rankings, that’s a lesson for the future I guess, the website is moving backup, but slowly, it initially dropped to page 11 after adding the site map, now its on the 9th page with results varying from one DC to the other, that’s of course after deleting that damn sitemap.
