SeoAlchemist

Jeremy Zawodny left Yahoo last week but the hacking & coding aviator is not going to be flying solo for very long, as it looks like Zawodny has found an open nest to land in at Craigslist.

I realized that craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused groups of people who really care about doing things well, and an open-source friendly environment.

Craigslist usgae has grown substansially in rural markets over the past few years, and given the state of the economy, the open local market is more or less destined for more growth. With Jeremy on board, expect great things from Craigslist and third party developers, as Hack Day may become everyday at Craigslist.

This afternoon Yahoo confirmed that it had entered into a paid search deal with Google. That deal is described by Yahoo in its press release and by Google in a related blog post. Google takes pains in the post to insulate the deal against anti-trust claims.

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Tim O’Reilly recently offered a great marketing tip I wanted to share.

Another critical piece of the Yahoo machine has left the garage, as Joshua Schachter, who Yahoo brought in when they acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, is resigning from his post.

Schachter joins the founders of Flickr, Jeremy Zawodny who was the semi-reluctant voice of Yahoo in the blogosphere, and Yahoo VP Jeff Weiner; who have all moved on from the company over the past week.

Yahoo, given its internal troubles, exodus of multiple high level executives, the Microsoft fiasco, and its current dependency on Google to please its stockholders; looks more like a out of control car flaming down the expressway to nowhere, running on fumes, muffler clanking on the road, with its passengers jumping out before the inevitable happens. (more…)

The LiveSide Blog reports that Live Search is testing out a new feature that allows users to customize the skin or background of the Live.com home page.

The LiveSide Blog has a screen capture of one of the skins, a couple in a lake. If you look at the right-bottom corner of the page, you will notice a link that says, “personalized page.” I assume clicking on that link will give you several background themes to select from.

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The SEO power of in-content (or “Wikipedia-style”) links may be up for debate but from theory, practice, and experience webmasters know that a link in a context is much more powerful than an isolated (sitewide) link in a sidebar. It is logical to think that internal linking should also be done with the help of in-text link rather than navigation menu.
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Last week, the three major search engines
came together to
say how they agree — and disagree — over the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
It’s such an important standard, one every webmaster should understand. To
help, Vanessa Fox has compiled an extensive and outstanding overview of it
at Jane & Robot in her

Managing Robot’s Access To Your Website post.

The tutorial takes you through key areas such as:

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To pass government scrutiny on the Yahoo! ad deal Google claims they do not engage in price fixing, which is something that they have already publicly admitted doing.

Two big names have left Yahoo and Ask and speculation is that a third is to go. Below, more about he departures of Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawdony, Ask’s Peter Linsley, and Yahoo’s Jeffrey Weiner, who is rumored to be leaving soon.

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