Farewell Yahoo Directory: A Closer Look Before Saying Goodbye

Yahoo SVP, Cloud Platform Group, Jay Rositer said in his recent blog post. “At Yahoo, focus is an important part of accomplishing our mission: to make the world’s daily habits more entertaining and inspiring. To achieve this focus, we have sunset more than 60 products and services over the past two years, and redirected those resources toward products that our users care most about and are aligned with our vision. With even more smart, innovative Yahoos focused on our core products - search, communications, digital magazines, and video - we can deliver the best for our users.”

Yahoo announced the closure of their three products:  Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Education and Qwiki

It was nearly 20 years ago when Yahoo Directory was made as a digital phone book of websites that aid netizens in exploring the internet, and now it will ring our new year by killing its web directory. Thousand of websites were being stored by topic and location that could be explored by subject area where people can easily search and retrieve records and this coming December 31, 2014 will officially shutdown.

In its heyday, Yahoo Directory was a great help in creating backlink to your website. It is one of the first site that should not be ignored and top of the priority.  Not only of having a high Page Rank but also it has millions of traffic and considered to be an Authority Site.  SEO specialist are dying and making full effort to make their website listed in a correct category.  Even in my SEO tools that I am using, Yahoo Directory is always on the top list. And now, is will be gone soon.

Yahoo Education is another Yahoo Products that will eventually shutdown. A site of connecting people to school and degree providers will be closing effective next Tuesday (September 30, 2014).  The reason why they are also closing this is they see that there are alternative online resources that are available for internet users.

The Yahoo Qwiki.  This coming November 1, 2014 a movie-making app will be shuttered. It was only a year (July, 2013) since Qwiki was deployed for online users that helped users to automatically create short movies based on events from user’s camera roll. If you never tried it, better visit this website before it’s too late:  http://www.qwiki.com/download_videos

In 2010, Yahoo publicized that they will never close this directory, but thing changed now.  Internet is evolving so as the users. There are more than 60 products and services have shut down for the past two years.

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Black Hat Social Media Marketing: An Emerging Threat

Before, there is a so called Black Hat SEO that is by doing unethical practices just to rank their desired keywords in search engine.  There are several ways in knowing black hat SEO; with this they can easily outrank their competitors. However, the result of this is just temporary and worst your website will be doomed by search engines. Due to ever-changing algorithm of Google this aberrant practices are no longer effective and will just harm your website.

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is mostly used my netizens.  According to research almost 72% of internet users are active in social media sites. They tend to consume their time not on researching but rather through socializing with their friends.  Internet Marketers grab this opportunity to advertise their websites.  There are now tons of social groups and Automated “LIKES”, "TWEETS" and “FOLLOWERS” Software that have been made that violates the terms and conditions of social media website.

So, what are these Black Hat Social Media Practices that are now emerging in Internet world.

1.  As I mentioned above, there are thousands who are making applications for Automated LIKES, TWEETS and FOLLOWERS.  Once you purchased and used this third party program, you will gain instant thousand LIKES, TWEETS and FOLLOWERS to your page.  Of course this is an advantage to your website, this is “social signals”, however, you are in the wrong place, these likes and followers are all fakes and will not bring traffic or conversion to your website.  Another thing with this program, this bogus Likes, Tweets and Followers are not your prospect audience and will not give you sale.  You are just consuming your time.

2. Youtube Views and Subscribers.  Youtube is the 2nd search engine that mostly internet users used in searching.  That’s why online marketers used this as one of the avenues in promoting their website.  They hire a person who will make them an advertising video about their website and upload it in Youtube.com. This is great idea. Your customer can easily understand what you are selling or what your website is about.  However, with a few viewers and subscribers your video is in vain so as your website. Black Hat Social Media practitioners used some software that also generates views and subscribers to your playlist; this not a good way to make your video famous.  This is a fake views and subscribers.

3. Creating Fake Social Media Profiles.  This is very effective way of liking, commenting and gathering information about your competitors.  At first they will like your page, comment good and enticing words for you to respond with their queries, but once they already get the needed information they will now strike to your website or imitate your strategy.  In addition, they will also give you fake negative reviews.  They will compare your website and to their site giving them a positive reviews while you are on the opposite reviews.  This is another way of making social media as unreliable source.

4. Social Groups.  Making social media groups is easy as ABC.  You can invite your friends to discuss something that is related to your group’s description. You can comment to each other.  Now, where is the black hat here?  Social groups are also being exploited by social media marketers by posting irrelevant content to such group.  For instance, the group is about Renting Property in the Philippines, of course the members should be realty brokers, hotel owners, condominium owners, house and lot owners etc., but this opportunist people will join to your group and post unnecessary advertisement that is against to your guidelines.  They spammed your group’s wall with same or unrelated content.

I hope this article enlightens you about this rising unscrupulous strategy.  You should be vigilant of doing your social media marketing and avoid this because it might cause threat to your traffic. If you have any questions, feel free to comment and let’s discuss it accordingly.

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SEO Before and Now: The Truths You Should Know in SEO World

SEO before was not quite difficult.  You just to create back links into your website, as long as you follow the guidelines of search engines especially Google, surely your website will eventually rank and dominate result pages in no time.  The more quality links you have the better chance to rank your keywords. But not today! There were several updates that search engines deployed like Panda, Penguin etc. because SEO was being exploited by some claiming SEO guru. Below are some Truths about the old fashioned and ineffective strategies today that might cause tremendous havoc to your website if you still apply these.

1. Social Bookmarking and Directory Submission Sites.  These marketing avenues are the most used and prominent strategies in gaining back links.  Besides, these are so easy and take little time to submit your website.  In a matter of minutes, you already have links.  SEO Freelancer don’t even care about the Page Rank, the relevancy, how old the website they are linking, etc. they just after with the back links they will gain.  Here is the truth about social bookmarking and directory submission, frankly, these are no longer helpful in promoting a certain site. Search engines already penalized most of these sites.  So, be very careful to where you are submitting because you might know that your site is already in the black list of search engines.  Still, there are some sites that are effective such as Reddit, Slashdot.org, Google Submit URL, Yahoo Directory, Dmoz.

2. Article Submission Sites.  Another effective marketing avenues before is by submitting your content in article directory sites. The more the merrier as the phrase goes. Spreading your content to different article sites with mostly a back link in their author’s bio is the key to acquire back links. However, by submitting it continuously (duplicate content) will hurt your website as well as your ranking.   This is now a super big NO in SEO world. To learn more about this read the article: “Matt Cutts: Using Article Directories for Links? Just No".

3.  Forum Participation.  Several years ago, forum posting and commenting is one of the best avenues that most SEO Freelancers do when optimizing a website.  This by registering in a forum site, once you already gain the trust of the webmaster you can now add your signature (with link redirecting to your site). The main objective of forum is to participate in a thread and offer an informative and factual comments as you build relationship among members.  Due to exploitation of many SEO specialists, search engines devalued the links coming from forum sites especially those that are not relevant to your niche. Most of them are not making valuable information to the reader and they are just after with the link they gained.

4.   Blog Commenting.  Doing intensive blog comments in your website is a waste of time.  More and more websites today are closing their comment section due to spam comments.   In addition, this strategy will also make your website punished if you commented to those sites that are not related to your topic and have tons of spam comments already.  So be very careful in doing this, you should filter where to comment and set some standards.

I hope that these truths about SEO will help you decide what to choose in optimizing your website.  Always remember, “Quality Over Quantity”.  We should be very vigilant in picking where we put our link to other’s site.  It takes time and a lot of hardship of searching the right back links.  We should be very patience and be keener. But, in the long run once you do it right, in SEO manner, I am sure that your site will rank and potential traffic will come across. If you have any queries feel free to comment or email me.

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