Today In The News …

Today, being Thursday, was the day that Jim Hedger and I host our weekly radio show on Webmaster Radio. it was a great show with a focus on Yahoo! in the news and a great interview with Applied SEO’s John Carcutt.

There were two big stories about Yahoo! going on. The first was the introduction of Delicious info into the results. While most of us currently aren’t seeing it, a beta rollout of the new feature is live to many. For those who can, below the description in the search engine results Yahoo! is placing information from Delicious including the number of times the page has been bookmarked and it’s tags.

This of course lead to a discussion about how useful this could be to a searcher and how abused this could be by SEO’s. I liken it to the green bar PageRank. When we didn’t see it we didn’t focus on it but as soon as it became visible it became the crack of the SEO industry (except more expensive in many cases).

Hopefully Yahoo! has learned from Google’s error and we’ll see some great controls. You can read a great article about the launch on Search Engine Land at http://searchengineland.com/080121-095345.php.

We then discussed the massive layoffs over at Yahoo! reported by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a whole lot more. Will this be the downfall of Yahoo!? Can they keep up if they have less staff? Are they just trimming the fat? The conclusion – we’ll have to wait and see. You can read an article on the subject by Jim Hedger as well on the New York Times site.

After a quick break we interviews John Carcutt from Applied SEO on his interesting business model of white label SEO. He works for other firms, as those firms, gives them the credit and collects the paycheck. Not a bad model and a great guy. Thanks again John from the great hat at SES San Jose 2006 !!!