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Lord of Yahoo!'s Short Tail

Rand Fishkin

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

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Rand Fishkin

Lord of Yahoo!'s Short Tail

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Someone has Yahoo!'s number down cold. Ranking on page one for thousands of the most popular search phrases in existence, the site isn't even offering content of its own - instead, they're aggregating content from others and serving what is, in essence, duplicated content that's been scraped and re-packaged. Their business model? Serving ads... What are they ranking for?

  • photography - #1
  • design - #1
  • marketing - #1
  • humor - #1
  • media - #1
  • security - #1
  • mp3 - #2
  • spam - #2
  • podcast - #3
  • ajax - #4
  • flickr - #4
  • firefox - #6
  • music - #7
  • and hundreds more...

I think it's all because of one page, too - a page that linkers can't get enough of:

Technorati Tags Page

The question really should be - are Technorati tag pages deserving of their rank? Do they provide high quality information that Yahoo! searchers find useful for these single word terms?

Don't get me wrong... As an SEO, I love knowing that I can often dominate a sector in Yahoo! with just a few entries at Wikipedia, a Technorati tag and an article at About.com, but I'm forced to ask if this is really what's best for the searcher (and the engine). I'm also curious about why Yahoo! gives them so much more visibility than Google or MSN - I don't see the same level of Technorati-SERPs-dominance at those engines.

p.s. I think the title should technically be "Lord of the head of Yahoo!'s search demand curve," but it just doesn't have the same ring.

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