Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator
Closing out 2008, Yahoo! continued to lose usage share points, as Google widened the lead as the predominate search engine of choice. Rumors persist about the sale and acquisition of the struggling engine. And yet Yahoo! remains steadfast in its attempts to restore the engine’s image by undergoing both performance changes and staffing changes.
Late in 2008 Yahoo! announced it would be making changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. Some industry analysts have reported seeing some of these changes beginning to take shape with the increased emphasis on URL naming conventions as well as Yahoo!’s attempt to clean up the relevancy of search results. Yahoo! has not publically released any specific algorithm updates so far in 2009.
Just as the share of advertisers using Yahoo! sponsored search has decreased (see graph), Yahoo! has begun implementing dramatic changes on the paid search side of the business. Yahoo! has revised their terms and conditions which allows Yahoo! to create ads, edit keywords and optimize PPC accounts.
Yahoo!’s share of advertisers decreases throughout Q4.
In 2009 expect to see continued changes from Yahoo! as they stay committed to being competitive in the search arena. Don’t expect people to say “Yahoo! Who?” anytime soon.
