Another collision of local search and social conversation: It’s called Yahoo Neighbors, and I think it has the potential to be really big and really important in the local/small business space. That link points to my fairly lengthy overview on Search Engine Land.

Yahoo Neighbors is essentially a forum or message board for every town in the USA. It’s an opportunity to add a layer of conversation to any local search someone does on Yahoo. In a sense, it brings some of the conversational aspects of Twitter and Facebook and adds them to local search results (but obviously not as fresh/real-time as Twitter is).

I write about marketing on Yahoo Answers pretty regularly, and about the exposure opportunities that exist there for small/local businesses … but, in reality, Yahoo Answers offers very little for, say, a local business here in the Tri-Cities that only serves the Tri-Cities. There’s no “Tri-Cities, Wash.” category on Yahoo Answers. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a reason for a local restaurant owner, real estate agent, or bike store owner to devote time to Yahoo Answers.

But Yahoo Neighbors is a no-brainer for folks like that, for all the same reasons Yahoo Answers is a no-brainer for other small/local businesses:

• Exposure/mind-share/familiarity
• Reputation management
• Creating authority status in the community
• SEO

I think that last point could be especially powerful. As I said in the SEL article, Yahoo Neighbors is obviously built with SEO in mind and there’s no reason to think these local conversations won’t rank very highly in the SERPs. They will. And those conversation pages will have a lot of local, long-tail phrases — most of which are very easy to rank for, especially in smaller cities.

I also like how the RSS feeds and email updates on Yahoo Neighbors can serve as simple reputation management tools. That restaurant owner I mentioned earlier should sign up for the RSS feed of the “Restaurants & Night Life” category in his/her town.

Add it all up, and I think Yahoo Neighbors could be huge … but it’ll take a while to catch on in areas like mine, with smaller population bases. And I can’t help but wonder if Yahoo has the patience for it to succeed in small town America.

Google Maps users have spoken and the verdict is clear: They say Google is a 3.5 star company.

I’ve looked at Google’s local business listing many times before, but don’t think I ever noticed so many reviews until today. I’m sure they’ve been there; I just wasn’t noticing them. After years of looking at the reviews of real estate agents, local restaurants, doctors, and you name it, it cracks me up to see such an enormous, international corporation getting reviewed on its own Maps property. Nice.

And sure enough, the other search engines have reviews, too.

Can’t say I’m surprised that Microsoft is only 3 stars, compared to Yahoo’s and Google’s 3.5 stars.

I made one last check, not on a search engine, but on Merchant Circle. Figured they’d have some interesting reviews in light of their marketing history and customer service issues. But no … no stars showing, only four reviews and one of those is not actually of Merchant Circle. The three reviews MC does have include two 1-star reviews and one 5-star review … for an average of 2.3.

But gasp! … an unverified listing in Google Maps! Who on earth is doing SEO for Merchant Circle and let that slip? Yikes.

Couldn’t help but notice and pay attention when I saw these ads running in the Tri-City Herald this week.

These are ads promoting the fact that my local paper (part of the McClatchy Group) is now part of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium. I wrote on SEL a couple months ago about the success of this effort — it’s a collaboration in which newspapers use Yahoo’s ad-targeting technology to sell more online ads.

I actually think these ads are pretty effective from the small business owner’s perspective. They explain the idea of targeted ads without getting too complicated. (You can click the image to go to Flickr and see a larger version.) The ad on the left is the first one I saw, and then the purple one is more recent. If I’m a small business owner thinking about local online ads, that ad on the left would probably compel me to at least learn more about how it works, what it costs, etc. It says

One of these women is shopping for a car. Do you know which one? We Do!

Meanwhile, I don’t think I’m seeing any of the ads themselves on the newspaper’s web site just yet; I still see DoubleClick ads, which are part of Google’s empire. I’ll be interested to see how well the ads are targeted to me when they launch. I do spend a fair amount of time on Yahoo properties and also visit the paper’s web site somewhat consistently, too.

If you’re a small business owner that’s following my advice (or anyone’s) about marketing on Yahoo Answers, things just got a little more difficult today.

Yahoo says that Level 1 users will no longer be able to include active links in their answers. You can still include a URL, but it won’t appear as an active link. As the Yahoo blog post says, this is a “small but significant” change.

What’s it mean? If you’re playing by the rules and providing helpful answers to the community, not spamming, just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It just means that, if you’re still a Level 1 user, you’ll have to work a little longer and keep adding value to the community before your links will become active/clickable. (They’ll still be no-followed, just as they have for a long time now.)

There are a couple articles I published on Search Engine Land over the past few days that I think bear mentioning here for their meaning to small businesses. If you’ve already seen both of these articles, move along.

Yahoo Adds Local Content To Search Results Via SearchMonkey

What’s going on: All Yahoo web searchers are now able to see a lot of local business content in the SERPs without lifting a finger. The “SearchMonkey apps” for Citysearch and Zagat are now on by default, joining Yelp and Yahoo Local. I explain it on the SEL post, but it basically means that a small business with full and accurate listings on these local/social directories can get some extra exposure now in the Yahoo SERPs.

Yahoo Adds ZIP Code Ad Targeting

What’s going on: If you use Yahoo Sponsored Search, you can now geo-target your ads to specific ZIP codes. As with all geo-targeting, it’s not perfect. But it’s something that only Yahoo and Ask.com offer. (And who advertises on Ask.com?) It’s brain-dead easy to do, too — the screenshots on the SEL post are from my wife’s YSS account. Just supply the ZIP codes you want to target, and Yahoo will draw you the map to review before you submit the new geo-targeted settings.

I’m not going to advertise everything I write these days on SEL — just the “Small is Beautiful” columns and, as in this case, anything I think needs to be seen by the small/local business owners who read SBSM.

I’ve said before that I’m no PPC guru, so I could be way off on this one. But if you’re running PPC ads on the content network (Google or Yahoo), I’m thinking there’s a better chance your ad will be noticed and clicked on when there’s no content on the page to distract the user:

(click for larger version)

Yahoo Sponsored Search FTW!

If you do real estate in Richland, WA — and I just happen to know someone who does — you could buy your way to the top of both Google and Yahoo. Today. For a killer search term.

Have a look at the SERPs for the phrase [richland real estate]: on Google … and on Yahoo:

The same site ranks at number one on both search engines, and also happens to rank at number three on MSN Live Search. I’m not going to link to it, but here’s a screenshot of what it is: A domain for sale owned by a real estate web site vendor.

I don’t know, G and Y … I know real estate is a spam-filled crapfest, and real estate SEO is a joke, but isn’t it pretty obvious this doesn’t belong anywhere in the SERPs, much less at the top? I’m biased, but maybe instead you could reward the folks who are creating actual real estate content that has value to readers? Just sayin’ is all…….

Most of your SEO attention is probably focused on what makes Google tick and, considering the search market share numbers, that makes perfect sense. But you must diversify your traffic sources, and ignoring all other search engines is a mistake.

Eric Enge’s recent interview with Yahoo’s Priyank Garg gives us all a chance to peek under the hood of their search engine. Even though this interview didn’t play well on Sphinn, I think there’s a lot of valuable information in the conversation that’s worth talking about. Here’s what caught my eye, and why….

Links and Yahoo’s Algorithm

Garg offered some specific thoughts on where links fit into Yahoo’s algorithm at the moment:

“…over the last few years as we have been building out our search engine and incorporating lots of data, the absolute percentage contribution of links and anchor text to the natural ranking of algorithms or to the importance in our ranking algorithms has gone down somewhat.”

That’s really not too surprising. I think most of my SEO peers would agree that Yahoo has never relied as heavily on links as Google; no search engine does, for that matter. Lest you think links don’t matter at all with Yahoo, Garg quickly added this in a follow-up question:

“They continue to be a very significant factor.”

Yahoo’s Take on Paid Links

We know Google’s stance on paid links and how they can pollute the SERPs. In the interview, Garg says Yahoo is somewhat less adamant about paid links and what they mean as a signal:

“There’s no black and white policy that makes sense in our mind for paid links. The principle remains value to the users. If a paid link is not valuable to the users, we will not want to give it value. Our algorithms are being organized for detecting value to users. We feel most of the time that paid links are less valuable to users than organic links.”

Social Media and Yahoo’s Algorithm

Yahoo owns some of my favorite social media sites: Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, etc. Can those sites provide valuable data to the main search engine? You bet.

“…the locations that provide the most signals are the ones where users are taking active steps to recognize the value of content, whether it be through links they have created on their clean Web pages, or through social media sites like del.icio.us.”

Yahoo Keeps Some Spam in its Index

The interview took a really interesting turn when Eric asked about spam in the index. Garg explained that Yahoo is not trying to purge all spammy pages from its index. Here’s why:

“There is a query out there for which each page is relevant, and so the completion of our goal requires our algorithm to keep all the content we can, even the spammy ones. Of course, that’s something that becomes egregious on resources, and then sometimes, we have to make other choices. However, if there is a page that is generally okay but has some spamming techniques, someone might search for that URL, and as a search engine we want to make sure we have the most comprehensive experience we can.”

That statement speaks to something I’ve heard search engineers say at various conferences: There are some niches where fighting spam isn’t worth the effort. Porn, pills, and casinos are obvious ones. But even consider a vertical like real estate: If Yahoo (or Google) removed all spammy pages from the index, there are plenty of [city real estate] queries that would produce a barren wasteland of results.

Yahoo and Crawling Your Site

For whatever reason, you might want to keep a page out of Yahoo’s index. You could do that via robots.txt or by using the NOINDEX meta tag. And it still may not matter. Garg explained that a super-popular page (as measured by incoming links) might still end up in Yahoo’s search results:

“We do index a page and we will show its URL in search results if it is very heavily linked to the Web, even if it has a NoIndex tag on it.

“If robots.txt files says don’t crawl, we will not crawl, we will not even try to retrieve that page at all from our crawling. But if the anchor text to that URL, as discovered on the Web, indicates a strong preference for it to show up for certain queries, it might show up.”

Garg says if you’re blocking the page via robots.txt or NOINDEX, they won’t use your page title and meta description in the search results — they’ll use other signals (like incoming anchor text) when possible to create the listing in its SERPs.

Final Thoughts

I would’ve liked Eric to press for more insight into the impact of Yahoo’s other properties on its main SERPs, but that’s a minor quibble. This is yet another great interview Eric’s done, and it’s well worth the 15 minutes or so you’ll need to read it.