Yahoo! is struggling to cope with surging competition from Google and Facebook, with the web portal and search engine facing the prospect of making 1% of its 14,100 workforce redundant – just shortly after announcing 4% cuts in which whole departments were laid off.

Yahoo! was the subject of a failed take-over bid by Microsoft in the third quarter of 2008, and gross revenues have failed to grow from that point. After Yahoo! announced its redundancy plans, the company’s shares fell 4.4% in after-hours trading.

eMarketer, the business information service which analyses US online advertising spending, understood that Yahoo!’s display advertising share decreased last year to 16.2% from 16.5% in 2009 while – in the same period – Facebook accounted for 13.6% of display revenues, an increase from 7.3% in 2009. Yahoo! chief-executive Carol Bartz admitted that the company was not getting the click revenue it had hoped for.

Yahoo!’s current cuts contrast to Google’s fortunes, as the corporation implements an assertive recruitment plan to hire 1,000 new employees in Europe. In the same quarter that Yahoo!’s revenue had decreased by 4%, Google’s revenue had grown 26% to $8.4bn and its profits by 29% to $2.5bn.

Referring to Google’s further fourth-quarter profits of $2.54bn, outgoing chief-executive Eric Schmidt said: “We had a very, very good year and a very strong quarter”.

Following on from my earlier blog post about universities not teaching relevant web design skills, Opera and Yahoo apparently feel the same, and have come together to launch the Web Standards Curriculum.

It’s an entire standards-based web design course – free online to anyone, and covers HTML, CSS, Javascript and more. 

Well done to those concerned for taking the time to develop what is a great starting point for not only students (who can supplement their “formal” education, and teach themselves the right skills), but also teachers and businesses as well – able to use the resource to improve their current methods etc.  Let’s hope the universities and schools catch up quickly.

A major factor in achieving high search rankings is of course relevant inbound linking. Google analyses not only the quantity but the quality and relevance of the inbound links to your site to determine how important a result it is. This method, alongside keyword optimisation techniques has improved the relevance of search results greatly. Though as is the case with many aspects of the web, this system has in recent times been abused.

There are many websites which buy and sell inbound links to sites which disregard link quality and pass page rank, which has allowed the search results to be manipulated. However in 2007 Google made significant efforts to stamp down on this paid linking practice, enforcing penalties in terms of search ranking and page rank passing ability to the sites carrying it out. The result of this ongoing campaign by Google will be felt in 2008 as the websites who have worked to optimise their sites and legitimately gain quality, relevant links will begin to rise in the ranking and the sites which relied on paid links will begin to slip.

Quick Linking Tips

1. A good way to gain relevant links to your site is to get registered in appropriate online directories which are related to your business. Many of these directories request much the same information although have different limits on the number of characters available etc and registering can be a tedious process. An idea is to create a basic “submission kit” text file with brief promotional copy for your site in a few different formats including a one sentence description and 25, 30 and 70 word descriptions containing your keywords aswell as contact details and prewritten hyper links which can be pasted in quickly. A good directory to be on is Google’s Business Listings: http://www.google.com/local/add
2. Try writing informative and interesting articles which relate to your field of expertise and submit them regularly online. There are several quality article and blog sites where you can submit free articles. Be sure to include your necessary keywords in the article and make use of the hyperlinks the sites allow you to put in at the bottom. Use your keywords here aswell to link back to your site. Articles are especially useful for new sites looking to get spidered quickly. A good article submission site is : http://www.ezinearticles.com
3. Yahoo offers a reliable service which analyses which sites are providing inbound links to other sites. To look at this type “link:domain” into Yahoo’s search engine to get an idea who your competitors are being linked to by. This should provide ideas on where to look for acquiring quality inbound links which are relevant to your business. Yahoo’s version of this tool is more accurate than Google’s.

Ok – so we’re not actually for sale (before we get clients phoning in a panic), unless of course Microsoft wants to come in and offer $40 billion to aquire a thriving web design and consultancy company from Glasgow – the value they placed on Yahoo just last week, when they attempted to buy the web search company.

Their somewhat random offer was actually 62% above the “market value” of Yahoo, based on their share price at the time, a valuation most traditional businesses in the past would have jumped at.  But just how do you value a “Web Company”…  It’s certainly not an easy task, and (as MS have shown) not just down to the current stock market trends.

 So… will we see a MSNahoo?  Or will (as many as speculating) Google suddenly appear as a rival bidder.  And what will it all mean for us web users?  Less choice?  A better service?  Only time will tell…

Ps – I was only kidding about selling NSDesign for $40 billion…  I’d take less..