Let’s take a quick step back in time to late October of this year. That’s when Mayer made her first acquisition since arriving at Yahoo. The purchased company, named Stamped, produced a recommendations app by the same name. James Niccolai, reporting on the story for CFO World, noted that the app was developed by former Google employees and had even received financial support from Google Ventures. Mayer visited Stamped shortly after the purchase and tweeted that she was “happy to be reunited with Robby and his team.”

Stamped was an iPhone app that I like to think of as an “external memory.” It let users keep track of restaurants, books, movies, and other things they like, and let their friends know about them. I say “was” because at the time of the purchase, Stamped reported that it would be discontinuing the product at the end of the  year. Users can download a PDF copy of their data. Niccolai noted in his article that they were planning to build a “big, mobile, and new” app for Yahoo, but didn’t supply details.

Yesterday, Yahoo made its second acquisition since Mayer became CEO: a video chat start-up named OnTheAir. John Ribeiro, reporting the story for the IDG News service, noted that “Yahoo sources said the acquisition was for talent, and that the OnTheAir product will not be continued.” Four of OnTheAir’s five-member team hold degrees from Stanford, the same college from which Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (and Marissa Mayer, for that matter) graduated. The remaining member of the team, according to his bio, held an interesting job before joining OnTheAir: he worked at Google on infrastructure that supports Gmail and Google+.

Perhaps it’s too soon to call it a pattern, but the similarities between these two purchases can’t be ignored. Mayer acquired two companies that included former Google employees; both firms worked on creating useful mobile applications; and both acquisitions focused on gaining the talent as opposed to the company’s actual products. Clearly, Mayer thinks Yahoo’s future involves making mobile apps.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention when Mayer participated in her first earnings conference call since accepting the position of Yahoo CEO. Juan Carlos Perez, reporting on the call for Computerworld, highlighted her interest in the mobile field, and her desire for Yahoo to do more, and better, in this area. “We’ve made progress, but Yahoo hasn’t capitalized on the mobile opportunity,” she said; Perez noted that she felt “it has ‘underinvested’ in its mobile front-end development.”

Furthermore, according to Perez, Mayer believed that Yahoo’s “mobile product lineup is too fragmented, with more than 76 different iOS and Android applications. ‘Our top priority is a focused, coherent mobile strategy,’ Mayer said. This will involve a significant beefing up of the company’s mobile staff.” Clearly, Yahoo took two steps in that direction by purchasing Stamped and OnTheAir.

So what are the next steps? It’s possible that Mayer will acquire one more company that fits the pattern before the end of this year, but I don’t rank that as a high probability. Rather, I expect this month to be devoted to the new guys settling in and brainstorming, with Mayer dropping some hints (to them, not us, alas) as to where she’d like to see Yahoo’s mobile apps going.

Where, exactly, is that? Count on it not being games, at least not right away (if ever). My guess is that she wants to see these mobile apps fit together in a coherent package, but continue to be useful as standalone applications. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo comes up with something reminiscent of the iPad’s or Windows 8′s approach – done much better.

On the other hand, I don’t see Yahoo getting into its own hardware. I could see them creating custom mobile app packages for specific devices, and working with the manufacturers to install them on smartphones and tablets. It’s also entirely possible that this time next year, we’ll see at least three versions of some impressive Yahoo mobile apps: one for Android, one for Apple’s App Store, and one for Microsoft’s app store. It’s worth noting, at this point, that Yahoo has almost all the pieces it needs among its various products and purchases to build its own full-service computer software package; about the only thing missing is its own web browser. Or it could easily bring all these services together to build a better social site than Facebook (though the less said about Yahoo Groups, the better). We’ll just have to wait and see what Mayer and company cooks up at Yahoo, now that there are some more veteran chefs in the kitchen.

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At least that seems to be the conclusion drawn by Stephanie Hobbs over at Search Engine Land. She pointed out that Mayer was most recently involved at Google with heading up its local, maps, and location services. Her hand was evident in Google’s purchase of Zagat, the launch of Google+ Local, and even in the development of Google Maps. As Hobbs explained, “Mayer lives and breathes local, knows the increasing importance of local search, and is an expert in creating innovative user experiences in the space.”

So what does that mean for Yahoo? Let’s consider Yahoo! Local for a second. It was potentially on the chopping block in April, but survived. Check it out; it’s a gorgeous, information-filled platform that anyone looking for something to do in their area would find helpful.

When Yahoo followed up its decision to keep Yahoo! Local with launching Yahoo Marketing Dashboard in May, that may have seemed to many like it solidified the company’s commitment to local. YMD, in case you haven’t tried it out, is a free service aimed at small business owners. It offers a number of services, including tools to track your online reputation, business listings, traffic and campaign management, and more.

Just because you get a good-looking experience when you visit Yahoo! Local doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. Already, 22 million visitors appreciate it every month – but that’s much less than Yelp’s 71 million monthly users. So what changes is Mayer likely to make here?

Right now, businesses wanting to be listed on Yahoo! Local must choose between a free basic listing with phone number, address, hours, and products and services; or a paid, enhanced listing with logo, tag line, photos, and detailed description. Mayer understands the importance of the user experience – and the major role that well-organized content and information plays in that experience. Hobbs expects her to get rid of the paid listing, and strongly enhance the remaining option to “to allow businesses and users to add much more content ranging from menus to videos.” Look for the ability to create much richer business profiles on Yahoo! Local.

Mayer won’t be able to immediately reproduce Google’s purchase of Zagat, but she might manage a partnership with a local review site. This would allow Yahoo to add more reviews, deals and social features to its local search. Mayer has said before that you need great reviews to get local search right. Odds are that some kind of deal with Foursquare, or a site like it, may already be in the works.

Likewise, according to Hobbs, Mayer will also be thinking in terms of integrating even more social media into local search. The new Yahoo CEO played a major role in Google+ Local, so she understands how important it is to get this right as well.

There’s something else Mayer did at Google that we can hope to see her do at Yahoo, particularly with Yahoo! Local – clean up the design. Hobbs expressed her own hopes for a visual makeover at Mayer’s new company. “Right now, the site lacks the clean and streamlined design that many credit Mayer for championing at Google,” Hobbs noted. “We might expect Mayer to lead a major redesign of Yahoo that would extend into local…and vastly improve the ability of businesses to share content and users to find it.” To be fair, Yahoo has always presented a more “cluttered” interface than Google; how much Mayer can change that and still have the site still feel like Yahoo remains to be seen.

Hobbs goes into greater detail on several other areas she thinks Mayer may look at improving at Yahoo! Local. But I’d say the most telling point she makes is in Yahoo! Local’s demographic. It’s older and wealthier than local search on Google. “According to Nielsen data provided by our friends at Bing, more than 30% of Bing/Yahoo searches come from users in the 55+ age demographic, and more than 20% have household incomes greater than $100,000.”

That’s a pretty sweet target, especially when you consider that you can reach it with less expensive ads than you would be if you were trying to use Google. In that case, we’re talking supply and demand; Google’s local ad market is more saturated than Bing/Yahoo’s.

Does this mean you should start adding Yahoo! Local to your marketing plan? Well, you don’t need to do it right away, but you should certainly keep an eye on where Mayer’s going with her plans for the company. Depending on how it goes, it could make a lot more sense – and dollars – for you to shift some of your advertising budget in that direction. Good luck!  

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Kara Swisher does a great job of covering all the changes. After being spotted in Yahoo’s cafeteria getting her own lunch, Mayer added a weekly all-hands Friday afternoon meeting to the schedule. At the first of these meetings, she announced that the food at Yahoo’s URLs Cafe in Silicon Valley would be free from now on.

For those who don’t know, Friday afternoon all-hands meetings and free food in the cafeteria are classic Google staples. And more seem to be coming. Mayer seems to be planning big changes to the layout of Yahoo’s work areas and buildings. The idea would be to foster a more collaborative environment, probably with a more open floor plan, and add some “coolness” to the place. Mayer is supposed to also be looking at upgrading the goodies you can get at Yahoo’s stores, according to Mayer’s sources. Both of these should make anyone who has worked at Google feel right at home – and it’s putting smiles on the faces of those working at Yahoo (except for, maybe, the accountants).

Arguably, Yahoo employees can use this kind of salve to their morale. They’ve been through years of confusion, poor leadership, and dropping market share. Even so, everyone knows at least some of the reasoning behind these changes; as one of Mayer’s sources quipped, “There’s no free lunch.”

To that end, Swisher reports that “Mayer has been studying org charts carefully this past week” and several sources told her that “she has asked all her direct reports for strategic plans in the next 45 days.” Amid all the cheer surrounding the new CEO of the California-based company, I have to admit this comes to me as no surprise; we could hear the collective sharp intake of breath all the way over here in Florida. Yahoo’s layoffs have been legendary, and there’s no way Mayer will be able to avoid them completely. The seemingly-everything-Internet company is simply too big and sprawling, and Mayer will need to decide where to focus.

One person we do know is definitely leaving was originally pegged by some as likely to become a permanent Yahoo CEO. That’s Ross Levinsohn, who took over as interim CEO from Scott Thompson this year before the board chose Mayer. By some reports, Mayer actually would have liked to have him stay with the company, despite his joining in 2010 Yahoo in 2010 under then-Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. Search Engine Land reported the details of the severance he’ll receive; let’s just say he won’t be hurting any time in the near future, especially if Yahoo’s stock goes up.

So where will Mayer turn her focus next? As a product manager, many hope for a return to creating tech products and improving the ones Yahoo already owns. Some users clearly desire to see Flickr improvements, for instance, and then there’s turning Yahoo Axis into a better mobile browser. That’s just two of many possible examples – and while Mayer may need to make some layoffs related to products and services that don’t make her cut, she’ll also need to recruit new talent. With Yahoo’s campus taking on a more hopeful, more excited vibe, and Mayer’s long history at that other search company, you can bet that some of these great brains will come from Google.

Others will surely come from elsewhere. Yahoo is actively hiring to help make Flickr awesome again, as you’ll note at the first link in the paragraph above. Swisher and other observers think that Yahoo will soon make a splashy purchase of another company with a cool product. Unless that was already in the works before she came on board, I’m willing to bet that Mayer is going to wait at least a month or two; she has some other very important decisions to make, and while she does make quick decisions, they’re never hasty.

Here’s hoping Mayer gets enough time from shareholders and Yahoo’s board of directors to do whatever she needs to do to turn things around. Who knows? We might even stop seeing the company’s name in the press constantly preceded by the adjectives “beleaguered” or “embattled.” Now that would be a change!

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Kara Swisher broke the story at AllThingsD, citing unnamed insider sources. Though Yahoo employs around 14,000 people, she noted that “thousands of employees” could be laid off. The layoffs are apparently the upshot of a series of meetings Thompson held with top management at the end of March.

What will Yahoo look like after the layoffs? Swisher described the goal as “a drastically slimmed-down organization with a focus on media, advertising and new but unclear ‘future’ initiatives.” To that end, the layoffs will mostly affect those employed in the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo.

Swisher also seemed to imply that Yahoo may not be keeping its ad technology or search business. She cited her sources as noting that “Thompson and others are still trying to figure our how to dispense with” these parts of the company, and that Yahoo’s CEO has been talking with both Microsoft and Google on this topic. About 2,500 employees work for these units; their fate remains uncertain.

So exactly what would the new Yahoo look like? Swisher’s sources said the image emerging includes at least three divisions: global media; communications and search businesses; and global and regional sales. A fourth, smaller organization, employing perhaps 50 people, may focus on future innovation.

Sarah Lacy reported that the ax would come down at Yahoo as early as April 4 for those in the United States, and a day later for those located in other parts of the world. She notes that Thompson seems to be targeting Yahoo’s international division, “particularly those parts of Asia that aren’t China and India.” She points to Yahoo’s footprint in Southeast Asia being bigger than both Google’s and AOL’s, and apparently believes that Thompson is undervaluing this asset.

Though Lacy has disagreed with much of what Thompson has done at Yahoo up to this point (which is strange, since he doesn’t seem to have done that much other than hold some hush-hush meetings), she believes the layoffs are not a bad idea. Yahoo “is clearly a company that has been way too bloated for a long time,” and managing it must be nothing short of a nightmare – as it “is a jumble of silos, and getting its managers to all swim down is nearly impossible.” So if one can’t get the separate departments to act in unison, perhaps large cuts will get rid of the problem.

To those of us who have watched Yahoo for many years, this seems to be simply the latest move in a long death spiral. Thompson is trying to right a sinking ship, and at this point, it’s questionable whether anything will prevent the company from going down.

A sharp, lengthy blog post from Michael Smith, who worked for Yahoo in Southeast Asia until recently, brings the company’s problems into sharp focus. He notes that the only major thing Thompson can do to show he’s serious about turning Yahoo  around is start massive layoffs. “Any other move is pure fluff cause Yahoo is bloated, top heavy and needs to be shaken up,” he writes.

Smith points to Yahoo’s “lack of forthright, confident decision making” as its biggest problem. Everyone does what they want, which is really no way to run a company of Yahoo’s size. He talks of going to meetings “where we discussed how to make plans,” many of which were a waste of time and money “since the guy who spearheaded that level of planning is already out of the company.”

Smith points to another problem at Yahoo – many of the rank and file have already left, most of the hires have been management, and many of those came from Microsoft. “We used to joke that although MSFT didn’t actually buy Yahoo – for the most part MSFT was running Yahoo.” According to Smith, Yahoo now makes it money from ads, where it used to make its money from ads and search. “Yahoo gave search to MSFT” but didn’t save enough costs from the deal because “the amount of people working on search experiences is still way too high…if Yahoo outsourced search it should really do it. Get rid of all search related employees. Put a search box up and when a user clicks the button the rest is done by MSFT.”

Smith also discusses the Facebook lawsuit. According to him, it stems in part from the fact that Yahoo never benefited from that deal to the same degree that Facebook did. “Yahoo got single sign-in, which is great, and Yahoo users were able to share more easily on FB – worked wonders for Yahoo pageviews but FB got to easily export Yahoo address books and gleaned all the resultant data. Anytime Yahoo product managers tried to export the other way around or use the data we usually found that the agreement did not support that or that FB got to personally veto the Yahoo product idea.” The upshot was that “Yahoo lost social” and Facebook got stronger.

Smith noted that Yahoo not doing well with its deals and acquisitions is part of a pattern at the company. “Anyone remember the Zynga deal? Waste of time. Zimbra? Xoopit? Dapper?…Very few of these deals made Yahoo a better, more able company…I once heard a corp dev guy say his job would be measured by how many deals he did,” Smith notes, and not how many of them “actually grew the bottom line.”

Finally, Smith criticized Yahoo for its lack of innovation in ads, especially in the mobile space. “The ad division in Yahoo, some 900 strong, has not created a new ad innovation in years.” With its major focus on display ads, Yahoo faces a huge problem as Internet-connected mobile devices grow in their number of  users and importance. “Mobile is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The better Yahoo does at mobile with emails, comms products, media products and so on – the more the revenue will decline. There is no space to put display ads, there is no room for takeovers [ads] and as users demand products that work well for mobile – they are less forgiving than they are on the desktop.” Smith praised Yahoo’s Livestand, but noted that “creating a new experience like this from scratch within Yahoo is hard to do.” Here, he notes, it would actually make sense to buy a market leader, but he does not believe that Yahoo will spend that kind of money.

The layoffs will change the face of Yahoo – but only if those in charge use the momentum from the cuts to truly turn the company around, back into the innovator it once was and needs to be again to compete. Otherwise, these layoffs could simply be the signal that Yahoo is going under for the last time.
 

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Yahoo’s announcement of Yang’s resignation notes that Yang also resigned from the boards of Yahoo Japan Corporation and Alibaba Group Holding Limited. It also includes this excerpt from a letter Yang wrote to Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman of the board: “My time at Yahoo!, from its found to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo!” Yang also expressed enthusiasm for the appointment of Scott Thompson as Yahoo CEO two weeks ago.

Yang’s resignation crowns a tumultuous four months at the beleaguered search engine, during which it fired one CEO, entertained a variety of buyout offers, reportedly considered any and all options moving forward, and appointed a dark horse as its new CEO. While Yahoo’s press release offers few reasons for Yang leaving, speculation abounds. During Yang’s tenure as CEO, from 2007 through 2009, he turned down a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft – a misstep he may never live down. It caused Yahoo’s stock to tumble, to the point where the company is now worth around $20 billion.

Some believe, therefore, that Yang was pushed out, rather than leaving entirely of his own free will. Perhaps he simply saw the writing on the wall. A number of activist investors in Yahoo, such as Daniel S. Loeb of the hedge fund Third Point, have called for both Yang’s and Bostock’s dismissals. All nine directors on Yahoo’s board are up for re-election this year, and shareholders can nominate rival directors starting late next month. Yahoo has not scheduled this year’s shareholder meeting yet, but with matters aligned as they are, Yang may have realized that this might be his last chance to exit gracefully.

It’s a sad fall from grace for the co-founder of a company that once dominated the Internet as much as Google does now. To add insult to injury, Yahoo’s stock rose about four percent in after-hours trading right after the company announced Yang’s resignation. It might be the best move for Yang if he wants to see the company he helped start prosper. Evelyn M. Rusli,writing for the NY Times, reported anonymous sources close to negotiations as saying that Yang “played a heavy hand in discussions with potential investors,” and that “At times, Mr. Yang’s opinions seemed to diverge from the board’s consensus…creating a tense – and occasionally confusing – backdrop for negotiations.”

With Yang out of the picture, potential deals with Yahoo’s Asian partners – Softbank and Alibaba – may go through more quickly, releasing value for the company’s shareholders and capital for making changes. Yahoo’s new CEO may also find himself with more room to maneuver without the company’s co-founder looking over his shoulder. It will be interesting to see where this company from the pioneering days of the web ends up.

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You can read Yahoo’s official announcement here. It’s interesting to note that Thompson was a dark horse for this job; many outside observers didn’t have him on any of their lists. He clearly brings a different perspective from his predecessor, Carol Bartz, who was abruptly fired a few months ago.

Let’s start with his background. Kara Swisher notes that Thompson is a “genuine Internet geek.” He became president of PayPal in early 2008, coming to that position after serving as the company’s CTO, charged with handling its information technology, product development, and architecture. He worked at IT in his three previous companies (Inovant, Barclays Global Investors, and Coopers and Lybrand) creating and overseeing global architectures and technologies. Translation: he’s understands how to handle large systems, make them grow and scale, and keep them secure in the face of extensive demands – even when they’re handling sensitive information, such as financial transactions.

Perhaps the most relevant factor for Yahoo is that Thompson was guiding PayPal’s mobile strategy. As the father of three teenagers, he gets mobile’s importance for the future. At the 2009 Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, he observed that none of his children use their phones to actually make phone calls; nor do they use ATMs. They keep in touch with their friends via text messages and Facebook, and they handle most financial transactions electronically. They rarely if ever use e-mail.

As Greg Sterling noted on Search Engine Land when writing about Thompson’s appointment, “Mobile is another area that Yahoo badly needs to focus on. While it had an early leadership position in mobile product development and advertising, that has been entirely erased by Google in the  past two years. Thompson’s knowledge of and experience with the mobile market may also be extremely helpful to Yahoo.”

Good as Thompson is in some areas, there are certain skills he lacks. He has no background in advertising or media. Sterling believes that Yahoo executive vice presidents Blake Irving and Ross Levinsohn, if they stay on board, can easily compensate for those weaknesses. But whether they stay is an open question; new CEOs tend to bring in their own teams. At the moment, there’s no way to tell whether Thompson will do this, or if Irving and Levinsohn will choose to leave on their own.

What does this latest development mean for the various asset-related deals in the works for Yahoo? Ray Bostock, the company’s chairman of the board, indicated in the press release announcing Thompson’s appointment that Yahoo “is considering a wide range of opportunities for the Company’s business, as well as specific investments or dispositions of assets,” so some of those may still go forward. Expect to see a deal involving China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank for the purchase of at least part of Yahoo’s stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan sometime in the coming months.

Does Thompson have what it takes to drag Yahoo out of its deep slump and fully into the twenty-first century? He may not be Steve Jobs, but he’s been living and working in the future perhaps more than any Yahoo CEO in recent memory – and he seems unencumbered by inconvenient prejudices for or against particular technologies. To judge from his conference presentation, rather that being afraid of change, or considering it a necessary evil, Thompson embraces it. He brings both hope and a badly-needed breath of fresh air to the troubled search company – both of which it has lacked for far too long. I wish him good luck with this monumental task; he’s going to need it.

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The New York Times offers the most complete coverage of this story. As currently being considered, it would not be an outright sale. The complicated deal would net Yahoo about $17 billion in cash and allow it and its partners to avoid having to pay taxes on it.

According to the Times, the terms of the deal involve Alibaba and Softbank (the major stakeholder in Yahoo Japan) setting up new subsidiaries consisting of both cash and operating assets which Yahoo wants to run. “Yahoo would swap out most of its stake in Alibaba and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan for these subsidiaries, effectively selling the holdings,” the Times explained. It’s called a “tax-free cash-rich split,” and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service considers it to be an asset swap rather than an actual sale.

The deal would value Yahoo shares at around $14 each – and when rumors about it started circulating, the company’s shares shot up to nearly $16 each. Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal notes that this “is ironic because over the past 4 years it has always seemed that its Asian and Arabic interests would be the future foundation of Yahoo in these emerging markets.”

To say that Yahoo’s been having a shaky year is an understatement. The company seems to have been wandering for several years, uncertain of its own identity;  heavy competition from Google and Facebook have only made matters worse. With the ousting of its CEO earlier this year and the emergence of several groups of investors eager to purchase Yahoo, it’s been just about anyone’s guess as to what Yahoo would do next and what it would look like in the months to come.

If this deal actually does go through, it would give Yahoo a huge infusion of cash it could use to restructure and reinvent itself. But what would it become? That’s a tough question – one even Yahoo’s own board can’t easily answer, if the unnamed sources quoted by the Times can be believed.

The answer might become clearer once Yahoo finds a new permanent CEO. Some analysts have already pointed to several possible candidates. These include Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, and online advertising entrepreneur Brian McAdams. Should Yahoo find its dream CEO, one can expect that the Asian deal will go forward, and the company will decide not to sell itself to the suitors it has collected in the weeks since the board fired CEO Carol Bartz. But Yahoo faces a tremendous challenge to find the right candidate with the right skill set. Kara Swisher at AllThingD describes it as being akin to looking for “one unicorn to work magic against increasingly troublesome dragons. Ability to sparkle a plus.” Good luck with that.

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A Washington Post video reported that China’s Alibaba is preparing to make a bid for all of Yahoo. The Chinese e-commerce company, run by Jack Ma, has long wanted to buy back the 40 percent stake that Yahoo owns in it. The bid, for $20 a share, would value the venerable search engine at $25 billion.

Eric Jackson, a major Yahoo shareholder and founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, thinks that price is too low. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Jackson let an investor revolt back in 2007 that led to a change in the CEO. But despite his reservation about the low price, in the video, Jackson noted that this was a good deal, better than the complicated deal being put together by Silver Lake. “Shareholders in general would rather have a quick, complete deal for the company,” he said, and observed that “[major Yahoo shareholder] Dan Loeb has already made it clear that if it’s some sort of back-door, dilutive [deal] that’s really not in the interests of shareholders, I am 100 percent sure that he’s going to fight that and there are going to be a lot of other shareholders that will line up behind him.”

Those shareholders, however, may never get the chance to protest that deal…because it may never even be offered. At least, that’s what Forbes seems to think. The deal won’t happen, it insists, “for one reason: Chinese-U.S political relations.” Forbes cites attempted purchases going back to 2005 in which Chinese companies tried to buy US companies, but the deals were nixed due to political opposition. One of the Chinese companies even provided services to the US government, but still found itself unable to go through with their deal.

As Forbes explains it, the potential Alibaba deal is a sign that the company is trying to expand outside of China. Indeed, according to Forbes, the company “is working on becoming one of the most dominant Internet companies in the world, and it needs to expand globally for this to happen.” However, “the political tensions between Washington and China remain high on issues such as this and the political pressure may be too great” for a purchase of all of Yahoo by Alibaba to go forward.

Could parts of deal be preserved, with Yahoo being broken up? That, Forbes notes, would not be tax-efficient, and therefore unlikely to win favor among Yahoo’s shareholders.

But the possibility of an Alibaba purchase should worry Yahoo less than what’s coming up in 2012: Facebook’s initial public offering of stock. CNBC quoted Clayton Morgan, analyst with brokerage firm Benchmark Capital, as saying that “Yahoo’s challenge to defend its display business as Facebook emerges is similar to Yahoo’s challenge when Google emerged, in that Yahoo appears stuck on a legacy platform and unable to adapt.”

That could be catastrophic for Yahoo, a company that gets a huge share of its revenues from display advertising. CNBC predicts that Facebook will take the capital it earns from an IPO and invest it aggressively into boosting its already-strong capacity for display ads.

While Yahoo’s display ads get their views because Yahoo produces and aggregates news content on highly-visited websites, Facebook has been finding more ways to use its social muscle. These include Facebook’s Social Reader, which lets users share experiences with their friends while reading news. With Facebook passing Yahoo as the third most visited web domain this year, Moran thinks that “Yahoo’s display share will erode as Facebook’s expands,” similar to how things played out in 2007 when “Yahoo sustained search losses to Google.” Indeed, this may already be happening: according to eMarketer data, Facebook took the top spot in US display ad market share from Yahoo this year.

How all of this will finally play out is anybody’s guess. But Yahoo truly seems to have entered a downward spiral from which it can’t pull up, no matter how much it innovates – because its competition continues to innovate more.

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The “death” of Yahoo Site Explorer has even inspired a eulogy over at SEOMoz by Michael King, to say nothing of write-ups at Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, among other places. The tool was born in September 2005. What is it about the closing down of a five-year-old tool that brings on nostalgia in SEOs?

Quite a bit, when the tool was YSE. Many SEOs started their career with this tool. It was free, after all, and at the time it came out, users couldn’t get the kind of information it offered without paying through the nose. Not only did YSE give you complete information on your own site’s links; it also gave you pretty complete information on links for sites you didn’t own. Google has always been coy about sharing this kind of intelligence; at best, the search giant offers only a sampling of links, since their algorithm depends so much on links to determine a website’s ranking.

As SEOMoz notes in its moving eulogy, YSE not only allowed you to get that information directly from them, but enabled other tools to deliver the same information. “Most importantly YSE we will remember you for telling us who linked to our competitors. This is how you truly changed the world. We respect you and commend for all your efforts and the API that once fed a variety of tools such as BackLinkWatch and the SEOBook Link Tool Suite. Your knowledge, speed and freshness will be missed,” King posted.

Although YSE is being merged with Bing Webmaster Tools, most observers do not believe that this particular capability will be preserved. To be fair, Microsoft has been updating Bing Webmaster Tools, as Search Engine Watch reported earlier this month. Now users can get a host of valuable information not previously available to them from BWT, such as malware alerts. It also seems sensible that Microsoft would include another of YSE’s beloved functions: “your special ability to tell us about everyone else that knew about us and where they’d shared it on the web,” as King characterized it in his eulogy. In fact, as Thom Craver noted at Search Engine Watch, Bing Webmaster Tools now provides expanded “Crawl Details” information which includes all inbound link information, in addition to information about malware.

This may be comforting, but YSE’s death still leaves many SEOs with nowhere to go for that all-important, accurate intelligence on their competitors’ links. Or does it?

Frank Watson at Search Engine Watch notes that he hasn’t found any free tool that provides all of the information users could get from YSE. “But there are some places that can give people low on funds a start,” he adds.

One place to start is Open Site Explorer, available from SEOMoz. You can compare information on up to five sites, and find out how many linking root domains and total links a web page boasts. The tool shares specifics and other useful information. But OSE also hides a lot of link information related to social media behind a pay wall, teasing you with the phrase “PRO only” under columns headed “FB Shares/Likes,” “Tweets,” and “Google+1.” If you want that information, it’s going to cost you $99 a month.

Web SEO Analytics offers a free backlink analysis tool, but limits users to 50 backlinks per report. If you’re patient enough to piece lots of reports together, it could work for you. Naturally, the company also offers a paid backlink analysis tool that doesn’t carry that restriction; it’s less pricey than OSE Pro. Watson also recommended SearchMetrics; the tool might be useful, but I wasn’t impressed with the amount of information it gave me for free.

Other tools that Watson recommended included the SEOBook toolbar and the SEO for Firefox browser plug-in. I haven’t tried these tools personally, but I know a number of SEOs who swear by these tools. Watson notes of the latter that it “will gve the individual numbers at the top or side of any page you have loaded…time consuming but free.”

There are a ton of good paid SEO tools out there – almost too many to list. And there, in a sense, is the rub: with YSE, you got information for free from a search engine that you’d normally expect to pay for. With this tool’s demise, competitive link analysis just got more expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

Karen Blakeman, however, offers some hope that free, extensive competitive link analysis still exists, and can still be had from a search engine. She recommends trying Blekko. She notes that Blekko lets you track down links in two ways, but you get the same results either way. If you haven’t tried Blekko before, they offer a unique approach to search; you can modify most of your searches with slashtags. Think of these as filters. The most useful filters for this purpose are /links and /domainlinks. Blakeman suggests using either of these with a URL or domain name.

For example, if you search on Blekko for http://www.seochat.com/ /links, you’ll find pages that link to SEO Chat’s home page; a search on Blekko for http://www.seochat.com/ /domainlinks lists all inbound links to the site.

The second way you can get link data is by going through actual search results. When you do a search on Blekko, you’ll note that every result features a downwards pointing arrow. When you click on this arrow, you’ll get a small pop-up box with several clickable options. Click on “links,” and you’ll get a list of sites that link to that page.

Incidentally, if you’re looking at search results on Blekko, you’ll also notice a clickable “seo” next to that downwards pointing arrow. Clicking on that pulls up a slew of statistics covering the results inbound links, arranged in charts. When I tried that for SEO Chat, I found that we have links from 40 states and 51 countries, and a number of other useful tidbits. But the point is, Blekko doesn’t know who I am…so I could get the same information about our competitors, for free. Incidentally, Blekko also offers a toolbar that provides SEO data as you browse. They just might be the most viable option for getting the kind of information Yahoo Site Explorer once gave. 

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Terri

The post Yahoo Site Explorer Merged With Bing appeared first on SEO Chat.

It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about preparing a holiday feast, but I know friends for whom it just wouldn’t be a real celebration without inviting friends and family over for a big meal. So when I saw Matt McGee’s article on Search Engine Land about the changes Yahoo made to enhance the user experience of searchers looking for recipes, I knew I had to try it out. So I popped right over to Yahoo and began searching for holiday recipes.

I performed several searches, but I’ll use my search for “diabetic apple recipes” as my example. (Hey, why should we get left out of all the holiday cheer just because we’re not allowed to overdo the sweets and starch?). The first difference I noticed was tabbed browsing. Right under the search box, there’s a line of tabs labeled Web, Images, Video, Shopping, Apps, Blogs, Recipes, and More (clicking on more, of course, gives you more options). The Web tab is the default. In general, this setup gives a very clean, intuitive look to the page.

Naturally there are ads at the top of the results, but at least they’re on target; one even offers a free diabetic recipe book. Right below the ads is a slider with images from recipes all over the web. I counted at least three sources on my slider at the original setting, two of which I’ve heard of and respect. By the way, even the slider is tabbed; in this case, the choices were Top Recipes (the default), Quick Recipes (recipes under 30 minutes), and Low Calorie Recipes.

For each image on the slider, you can click on a bar to “Show Ingredients & Time;” note that this will give you the time from start to finish, but only show a very few of the ingredients. That combined with the picture, however, should tell you enough to decide whether or not to click through to the recipe itself.

Are there particular ingredients you want to use or avoid? At the upper right hand side of the slider you’ll find an option to Filter by Ingredient. When I clicked on that, I got a drop-down menu that included radio buttons next to certain ingredients listed under either “Ingredients I Want” or “Ingredients I Don’t Want.” I had to click on “Ingredients I Don’t Want” in the drop-down before I could click on any of its radio buttons (only one of those headings is completely visible with all of its options at one time).

As you would expect, the recipes shown on the slider change depending on what you click on the ingredient filter. The options as to what you can choose to include in or exclude from a recipe also change. I found some interesting recipes playing around this way that didn’t turn up in my initial search.

Like to share recipes? Right next to the ingredient filter, there’s a tool that lets you share what you found on Facebook. Just hover over the image of the item in the slider you wish to share. Click the check box that will appear, and then click the Facebook sharing tool. Assuming you’re logged in to Facebook, a comment box for Facebook will appear with the link to the recipe and a thumbnail of the image already in place.

You major cooking mavens out there may remember that I mentioned an actual tab for Recipes right under the search box. If you click that, you get even more of the best stuff about this new interface. The column at the far left provides you with a whole assortment of filters you can click on: ingredients to include, ingredients to leave out, total time, recipe rating, type of diet (you get seven or eight options here, from “Any diet” through “Vegetarian,” and yes, diabetic is one of the options), meal type (dinner, dessert, breakfast, appetizer, etc), occasion (summer is an occasion? Who knew!), and source. It looks as if you get fifteen links by default in the center search results area, with the first ten including thumbnail images of the dishes. Next to the thumbnail you’ll find the total time to make the dish; next to that, you’ll find the beginning of a list of ingredients, and a number that tells you how many ingredients the recipe uses in total.

Yahoo gives you more than your typical ads in the right column with this setup. When I searched, I found four links to YouTube videos with thumbnails at the top of this column. Not all of the videos were closely related to my search. One of the videos was essentially an ad for a weight-loss program; the others, at least, kept to the topic of diabetic recipes. Below those videos, Yahoo listed more conventional text-based ads – and below those ads, the search engine included keyword-based links to more sponsored ads.

McGee notes that the Shopping tab offers a similarly rich experience. “Rather than just showing five or 10 products and a link into Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo shows a slider and new ‘Deals’ and ‘Buying Guide’ tabs,” he explained. That left hand column offers great filtering options once again. In a search for digital cameras, I could sort by price, brand, megapixels, camera type, image stabilization, memory type, lens mount, optical zoom, LCD screen size, whether or not the camera is waterproof, weight, and the stores in which the camera is available. Presumably the filters vary depending on your search. Also, “There’s a comparison tool that lets searchers check out up to five items from within the search results page,” McGee wrote. To use that feature, click on the check boxes under each of the items you want to compare, and then click the “Compare” link next to the check box. You’ll get a large pop-up table that shows you the various features of each item side by side.

All in all, Yahoo’s changes should go some way toward making the holidays a little easier for both cooks and shoppers. The layout and interface is more convenient for the visually oriented and those who like to interact with their search results; the filters are especially useful. I never thought I’d say this, but if you’re looking for recipes or gifts at this time of year, you might want to give some serious thought to searching with Yahoo. 

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Terri

The post Yahoo Alters Search Page Layout for Holidays appeared first on SEO Chat.