inter:digital strategies

All over the blogosphere the news is flying that Yahoo!! and eBay have struck a deal with major potential. The core of the deal is that Yahoo! will now be the sole provider of graphical advertising for eBay and that Yahoo! will promote and use eBay’s payment service, PayPal.

This doesn’t yet appear to have changed eBay’s heavy use of AdWords to advertise their sales on Google. It’s unclear whether it would, since Google is still leading Yahoo! by quite a healthy margin in the search arena. Abandoning that advertising source may be a significant loss of traffic for eBay at this point.

This deal is being touted as a significant alliance against Google by some sources, although it seems clear that it is just as much an alliance against Microsoft’s recent strategies as well.

Specifically, Yahoo and Ebay will be sharing some of their core assets to increase the reach of both networks. For example, Yahoo said it will become the exclusive third-party provider of all graphical advertisements throughout the Ebay site, Ebay will be providing "more up-to-date listings" from its online auctions to Yahoo, Yahoo will improve Ebay’s search functionality and both firms will offer a co-branded "Ebay toolbar" to their users.

Wolfgang Gruener, TG Daily

Read more about this new partnership:

• Search Engien Watch
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker
• Search Engine Journal, more from Loren Baker
• Search Engine Journal, still more from Loren Baker.
• John Batelle

I don’t think this service is likely to quite catch on, but I certainly found it interesting - here’s a
map of my parent’s house using Google Maps and ASCII graphics!

Once again I’ve crossed the boundaries between my two blogs - Bill Slawski and Gray Wolf have recently published articles discussing "inline linking". Gray Wolf’s original article spawning Bill’s response (not exactly a response, but an article prompted by Gray Wolf’s comments).

I felt the need to respond, but rather than addressing this from an SEO perspective, I thought of it as an accessibility issue, so I’ve posted on this at my Accessible Web Design blog. Since the subject definitely pokes around in the area of search engine optimization, I thought it worth mentioning here, as well.