All About Content

Red Herring has an interesting article about Yahoo’s attempts to catch up in a market it helped to create: contextual online advertising. For example, Yahoo is actively reaching out to bloggers by giving them more control over what ads their readers see.

Yahoo needs more than innovative products; the proverbial middle child needs to step up its PR. As the article points out, “In many cases, Yahoo managed to launch key products before its rival [Google], which is located just a few miles away in Mountain View, California. But the media and the blogging communities have overlooked Yahoo’s innovation as soon as the search giant launches the same service.”

Aside: Something interesting that caught my attention about the Red Herring article doesn’t have anything to do with Yahoo advertising. It’s that the URL they use to point to it reads:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15040&hed=Yahoo+Revamps+Search+Ads

But stripping away the stuff after the numerical article ID takes you to the same page no problem:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=15040

In fact, just adding gibberish to the end of the URL doesn’t break anything either. So it looks to me like Red Herring is just stuffing keywords into URLs for SEO purposes.