Last month Yahoo! published an updated version of its style guide, the one stop document for search engine optimisation tips for Yahoo! Search.
The tips include methods such as how to best optimise a variety of content generation methods such as copywriting through the best use of keywords. The guide even provides a list of useful resources, such as keyword research tools for rank checking, search-volume analysis and keyword-difficulty.
Yet as Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land notes, the Yahoo Style Guide’s recommendations fail to mention one tool that was once a vital part of the SEO armoury – their own keyword research tool.
At one point, Yahoo’s research tool was the best in the field. Its first iteration, Overture, would have been a familiar name to anyone who has been in search engine marketing since the early days. Originally a third party company named Goto.com, it was commonly seen as pioneering PPC sponsored links in SERPs. Before it was acquired by Yahoo – its biggest customer – in 2003, its relatively basic model of listing search results according to bid amounts was still incredibly useful in monetising search.
However, Overture was dropped in 2008 and Yahoo incorporated a new keyword research tool into the Yahoo Search Marketing portal. This is strikingly absent from a style guide list that recommends SEOMoz’s premium rate tool, the third-party Keyword Discovery tool and even the rival Google Adwords research tool.
Yahoo is recommending competitors over its own product – yet, as Schwartz notes in his own post, the YSM portal will soon be dropped itself and replaced by Bing’s AdCentre. The lack of inclusion of Microsoft’s search tools is puzzling however.
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