expertSEM

Early last week Yahoo announced their replacement for departing CEO and co-founder, Jerry Yang.  Carol Bartz, former Autodesk CEO, has been tapped to take the helm of the struggling Yahoo and has been tasked with trying to turn around the company’s fortunes. 

Coming from the Search Engine Marketing field, my primary concern is how the new Yahoo chief will affect their search business.  According to what I have read, Bartz does not intend to revisit a sale of the search business to suitors such as Microsoft, at least not in the short term.  If the intention of the new CEO is to hold on to the search business, my recommendation is to work on overhauling this business unit.

Over the past year, Yahoo! Search has fallen more and more out of favor with me.  The final straw was several weeks ago when they mysteriously changed their Editorial Guidelines without notice to their advertisers.  Of course this change affected one of my accounts.  Essentially in the blink of an eye, Yahoo destroyed a third of the search engine marketing revenue being generated for my client.  About 98% of my keywords were removed, with no chance of getting them live again.  People were and still are searching on these keywords, but Yahoo no longer has the opportunity to generate revenue from people searching on these terms.

I still have a number of clients that convert very well on Yahoo! Search, but not even close to the extent that they used to.  I’m not exactly sure what Jerry Yang did in his short tenure at the Yahoo helm to help develop and expand the search business, but it was not successful.  My hope is that Carol Bartz brings in the necessary people to focus on their search business and make Yahoo! Search a more viable vehicle for my clients’ search engine marketing dollars, like it once was.

Good luck, Carol Bartz.  You have your work cut out for you.