Someone has Yahoo!'s number down cold. Ranking on page one for thousands of the most popular search phrases in existence, the site isn't even offering content of its own - instead, they're aggregating content from others and serving what is, in essence, duplicated content that's been scraped and re-packaged. Their business model? Serving ads... What are they ranking for?
- photography - #1
- design - #1
- marketing - #1
- humor - #1
- media - #1
- security - #1
- mp3 - #2
- spam - #2
- podcast - #3
- ajax - #4
- flickr - #4
- firefox - #6
- music - #7
- and hundreds more...
I think it's all because of one page, too - a page that linkers can't get enough of:
The question really should be - are Technorati tag pages deserving of their rank? Do they provide high quality information that Yahoo! searchers find useful for these single word terms?
Don't get me wrong... As an SEO, I love knowing that I can often dominate a sector in Yahoo! with just a few entries at Wikipedia, a Technorati tag and an article at About.com, but I'm forced to ask if this is really what's best for the searcher (and the engine). I'm also curious about why Yahoo! gives them so much more visibility than Google or MSN - I don't see the same level of Technorati-SERPs-dominance at those engines.
p.s. I think the title should technically be "Lord of the head of Yahoo!'s search demand curve," but it just doesn't have the same ring.
Yahoo does have blog search, it's just really hidden here:
https://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=ir...
as an example of a search on "iraq" where news is on the left (big space) and blog search is on the right (sidebar). It's terrible, an embarrassment to the company, and only reachable through news.yahoo.com.
Then if you want to get to all blogs on "iraq" you click "more blogs" under the right sidebar which takes you to this:
https://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search...
If you want to do another search, you go to the search bar at the top, put in a term, and are taken to the view again, where you see news in the center (big area) and blog on the far right (side bar).
Technorati has no competition there as Yahoo has some of the worst interface issues with this ridiculous search loop. Frustrating for users, no doubt.
One the other hand, Technorati did know what it was doing when it originally listed the "technorati tag" instructions for bloggers, where for the first three months, the only example was a tag that included this link to make the tag work:
technorati.com/tag/photography
Many early bloggers were left to believe that only a link to Technorati would make tagging work. When someone at Google saw the instruction page, they said, "We kick people off our search results for stunts like this." But they didn't do it. Just appear to have modded Technorati down in results, but Yahoo and MSN have not. It seems to me that Technorati gamed the system nicely with their community blog tagging.
They are also enjoyimg some similar successes on MSN
Ironically, AMAZON up until this year - was on Page One or Two on Google - for virtually every competative term they had a book promoting Web page for.
This started when they changed the dynamic URLS to seo friendly URLs via server-side scripting.
I think Technorati tag pages are highly valuable
Right now I see dpreview.com as the #1 for photography in Google. It is a camera review site and isn't really all that relevent for the search. The Technorati page on the other hand links out to a number of relevent blog post just after three highly relevent ads.
Right now I see www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/ as #1 in Google, it might be relevent for a select group of people in the US. I see the Technorati as number #4 for the same search in Yahoo, and again the page is highly relevent for the search.
Technorati is a great resource and rightly deserves to rank high.
It is hard to provide the end user with a truly relevent search for a generic one or two word search phrase, but in my opinion Yahoo has been more successful in doing that.
I think what's worse is their Yahoo Shopping integration -- if you find a competitive search like "credit cards" and follow their shopping links...whoo wee does that stink. But, it shows up before #1, so I guess it isn't such a bad idea. ;)
Yea, all those bloggers adding Technorati tags on their sites. I've been guilty of it myself.
Got to give them credit though, they obviously know what they're doing.
I've seen them all over the SERPs at Google as well, but not #1 for keywords like that.
If I were a big search engine, especially one with a blog search engine of its own, I'd be more worried about the competition that Technorati is than the useful content it is not. Yahoo doesn't have a blog search yet, but it does have News which syndicates a lot of blogs. If I were the head of a search team, I'd treat Technorati as a threat and look for ways to steal their thunder.
Now, as a second thought, should users consider using "nofollow" attribs in their tag links? Or would they get more value for an outlink to a giant like technorati?
https://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=SEO
MSN search: SEO right now #2 is Technorati