Boom! And like that Yahoo was gone
So waaay back in August (which isn’t actually all that long ago - but it feels like an age!) I left this comment on Rand’s post asking for feedback to take to the MSN/Live team about ways they could improve their service.
It’s not so much an improvement to a current feature but I think there’s a gap in the market at the moment for them to over-take yahoo as the SEO/webmasters portal. Currently I use Yahoo for the majority of my link analysis and a hefty chunk of my keyphrase research. The problem is that Yahoo’s traffic data is now outdated and their link tool is getting more temperamental every day. If MSN/Live can come up with something which works and is effective then they could seriously undermine or even overtake Yahoo’s dominance in this area.
Well it looks like link data is finally available through Live if you simply add a ‘+’ before the search (example) - hat tip to Joost for picking this up!
Why is this better than Yahoo?
- Firstly you don’t have to log in - Yahoo plays up if you don’t log in which is a real pain when working on a computer which isn’t your own.
- Secondly it indents results from the same domain - no more having to scroll through masses and masses of links when you get a sitewide link.
- Thirdly - it appears to not count nofollowed links.
- Fourthly, it’s quicker and cleaner than Yahoo.
As I mentioned - I currently use Yahoo a fair amount but I’d love an excuse to ditch them. Now I have one and Yahoo is gone. I predict I most likely won’t visit Yahoo again this year.
In the UK Live/MSN and Yahoo send about the same amount of traffic (in my experience, maybe Live sends a little more) but I can’t help but get the feeling that Yahoo is sending less and less and Live is sending more and more. With all the things Live has in the pipeline I think by this time next year we’ll be talking Google and Live more or less exclusively and Yahoo will be a distant memory - like Ask, bless them.
If you have enjoyed this post you can subscribe to the rss feed to read more about how you can monitor and protect your brand online
Comment link
Joost de Valk on Mon (26 Nov) @ 12:04 pm
Thx pal
Comment link
Will Critchlow on Mon (26 Nov) @ 1:14 pm
I thought the same thing when reading Joost on the subject. “Wonder when I’ll next use Yahoo!”…!?
I’m also looking forward to wrapping some of that stuff up into tools - the data’s in the API as well so we get some seriously powerful data very easily accessible. Wooooo!
As Dave says (according to Jane, emphasis mine):
Comment link
David Mihm on Mon (26 Nov) @ 2:29 pm
Thanks for bringing this up, Tom. I just did a few searches here to test & I was pretty happy with what I saw. It still seems to me that Yahoo might be a bit better at prioritizing the value of the links than MSN, which still gives it some value in my opinion.
Comment link
Dr. Pete on Mon (26 Nov) @ 4:19 pm
It seems like some things are definitely going on at MSN. For a couple of clients, I’ve seen significant spikes in traffic from MSN/Live over the past 2 months (and we’ve done no targeting), bringing it from #3 to a strong #2 (about triple the traffic Yahoo brings).
Comment link
Tom Critchlow on Mon (26 Nov) @ 4:24 pm
@Joost - no probs mate
@David - That’s a very good point and something to bear in mind. To be honest I haven’t actually played with it that much. When doing detailed link research it doesn’t so much matter about the relevancy though as you want to analyse most of the links relevant or not (remember it’s only Yahoo’s version of relevancy which is a bit skew-wif!)
@Pete - I haven’t seen similar Pete - for most of the sites we manage/have access to msn + live = about 1.5 yahoo. That’s obviously a finger in the air figure with no real maths behind it
I might try and do a full report at some later date.
Comment link
Will Critchlow on Mon (26 Nov) @ 5:16 pm
@Tom - your phrasing is wonky there - do you mean “I have seen similar” rather than “I haven’t seen similar”? - whilst not exactly the same, you are talking about seeing the same trend as Pete…?
@David - you’re right that there are still benefits to the Y! platform, and I might be a bit flippant about not visiting at all (especially, I just realised, as I am writing a document about PPC that talks about Y!SM so I need some screenshots!).
@Pete - I guess it’s what we expect as it not only improves, but also MSFT puts its marketing weight (/monopoly) behind it and pushes it through Vista… I don’t use (m)any MSFT products software, but their web stuff is getting cooler all the time. In particular, the crazy stuff their research labs come up with rocks.
Comment link
Tom Critchlow on Mon (26 Nov) @ 5:21 pm
Sorry Will/Pete - that sentence should have been clearer. What I meant to say was I haven’t seen anything quite that extreme (msn being 3x yahoo traffic) but I am seeing the same trend (msn/live traffic increasing).
Also - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again but Microsoft sucks at naming things. Why are we still having to refer to “msn/live” all the time? Learn some branding! I can’t wait to poke holes in gatinaux when it comes out - I bet they don’t rank for ALL the misspellings (and there will be a lot!)
Comment link
Will Critchlow on Mon (26 Nov) @ 5:47 pm
The only good thing with a product name like gatinoh (or whatever the hell it’s called) is that it’s hard to know whether something is a mis-spelling or not. Actually, maybe that’s not that great a thing…
I completely agree though - and I think they know they suck. When I was at their seminar, their maps product manager was openly admitting it.