What an incredibly busy week it was last week as emails went flying about the apparent death — and then sudden un-death — of the Yahoo/Overture Keyword Suggestion tool. And all the keyword tool developers went scrambling to find an alternative Overture resource because everyone’s desktop keyword tools were lacking the most important thing — keywords and keyword count results.
If you want the entire skinned truth and get to the nitty gritty of the entire story, I’ve fully investigated it and I’ve had a few things clarified.
In fact, it’s all clear now.
First of all, this whole event last week of the Overture tool being down is a major business lesson to the developers of desktop tools that built a business, or at least a profit stream, around software that utliized Overture’s FREE keywords from a source that no one really has any control over. I was told by an independent source that there are just a few web properties that hit the Overture tool nearly 2 billion times a month. Two billion times a month!
Again, it all goes back to the fact that relying on a free source of keywords that is worn out and being hit too many times (abused) as well as not having any contractual control over its use is not wise when your keyword tool customers expect to use their keyword tool for years to come.
It’s too bad most people aren’t aware that the results of Overture are bunched together for various similar searches. Keyword Discovery uses the example in their FAQ answers of the following keywords being combined into one keyword count: “cheap international calling” “cheap international calls” “cheap international call” and “cheapest internal calls” — the count for all those keywords would be combined together for a total sum on the Yahoo/Overture Inventory Tool. Which means counting on that keyword count could be hazardous to the health of your website promotion and your search engine placement positions if you are not getting the real truth on which keyword is most effective.
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