The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool which was located at:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

is now redirecting to:

http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/

a webpage about Yahoo! Search Marketing products.

Alas, such a good tool is gone.

The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool used to return results for total number of searches done for the previous month.

For example if you searched for “SEO”, the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool would return results for all the keywords that had the word “SEO” in them in decreasing order of the total number searched for each keyword for the previous month.

This tool helped webmasters get an idea of what to bid for each term as the common sense says the most searched is the most popular keyword. It also helped in terms of search engine optimization as webmasters could know some terms that were popular but not very competitive in their niche.

Now that it’s gone we are left with very few “free” keyword suggestion tools. One of them I recommend is the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool returns related keywords, its synonyms terms (optional), advertiser competition for each keyword, search volume for the previous month for each keyword, and overall average search volume for each keyword.

You can also convert these keywords for the match type you want i.e… Broad, Phrase, Exact and Negative.

Yahoo has done some changes in the way they rank pages. They have just announced their latest search index update in their blog.

Quote from the blog:

( We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. )

So if your site was ranked well or not well in Yahoo, be prepared for a change. It also could be that you may not see much difference in the traffic you received from Yahoo. I think those who are honest and follow the right SEO techniques may have nothing to worry. Only if you are a spammer, you need to worry.

Please don’t confuse this with the statement by Adobe that Google and Yahoo will now be able to index Flash files.

This index update is an independent one, and has nothing to do with Yahoo being able to crawl Flash files.

It was not possible for search engines to extract content from Flash files, but now it seems things will change.

Google has posted in its blog that it is now possible for it to crawl Flash files. With help of Adobe, they have launched “Flash Indexing Algorithm” that will help its bots to crawl Flash files. This is good news for both site owners and searchers.

Now you can see some Flash sites in top SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

Flash was a major source of frustration for both SEO’s and designers. As SEO’s pressurized the designers to limit the use of Flash, and designers loved to include them.

Though, Google has accepted some limitations to this too. They say only text and hyperlinks can be crawled. If you are using text in an image inside Flash, they cannot be crawled.

It is interesting that Google was able to crawl Flash files, but the method was imperfect. Now they say they have got the right algorithm to crawl the Flash files.

Adobe is helping Yahoo! too to implement the Flash crawling technology; however as of now Microsoft’s Live Search is left out.