Yahoo Panama coming to the UK?

**Brendon** · 15-03-07

Well, well, well Yahoo are finally starting to sort themselves out. The strongest signal I've seen that they are preparing the UK rollout of the brand new, spangly Panama platform is their sending a rep to SEOdays. This is VERY unusual behavior for Yahoo, and makes me think a March release date is in the works. For you PPC types who want to be ready for it when it hits, this might be a good opportunity to get a sneak preview. Adcenter are sending a rep too, for a double dose of PPC freshness.

As it happens, I actually know one of the Panama programming team, and I have talked to him a bit about it. It sounds like they've done a proper job, it's a complete rebuild and more importantly, in my view, it leaves them with a much more FLEXIBLE platform to work with. One of the frequent critisisms I saw of the old Overture-era platform was that Yahoo were slow to make changes. I gather that actually had a lot to do with the old system being hard to work with from a dev perspective, rather than any actual bloody-mindedness on Yahoos' part.

Hopefully, that will change too. I'm hearing whispers that the rep is going to be a fairly senior type, so it might be an idea to get along to SEOdays, and get your bids for new / improved features in early...

**Jenny** · 15-03-07

Interesting - are Google going as well?
Jen

**OLBG** · 15-03-07

Are you going brendon?

**Paul Wright** · 15-03-07

That's a funny pic of you on londonseo.org brendon

I might have to pop along to this.

I had the chance to have a preview of panama some time back and in many ways it's identical to adwords campaign management with the added benefit of a few nice tweaks here and there. I like the "assisted keywords" stuff they've been mentioning. Turn around time for keywords is apparently going to be more reactive than proactive. It sounds like there's an initial automated trademark scan upon setup up then into the queue for activation a few hours later. As far as i can tell fine tuning and human moderation still occurs but this is a few days later similar to the overture process. The result is obviously a faster turn around from scratch to live for then end user which is something that we've all been crying out for.

Cheers
Paul.

**3wdl** · 15-03-07

I wish LondonSEO would stop organising events on Wednesday nights (and a4u for that matter). It clashes with my poker, damn it.

Our senior PPC account manager has been told that it's likely to enter the UK in April and he's rather looking forward to it.

Yahoo's biggest problem seems to be click fraud - I wonder if the new system will help combat that..

**Brendon** · 15-03-07

>> are Google going as well?

The grapevine says so - no official confirmation

>> Are you going brendon?

I'll be at the londonseo after-party, but I really don't think I'll have time to attend / help out at the sessions. Having just set up my limited company etc, I'm working hard to balance incoming enquiries and actually fulfilling client work - I just can't afford 2 days out right now

**sem4u** · 15-03-07

Reps from Google, Yahoo & MSN will be at SEO Days (Dave N's blog has confirmation of this). I'm not going but will be attending the London SEO event afterwards.

As for Panama I am hearing dates up until May for a launch. I need some time to get keywords into categories in a fairly old account I manage. I believe this will help when the switchover happens as the system runs much more like AdWords.

**yesasia** · 16-03-07

Originally Posted by sem4u

As for Panama I am hearing dates up until May for a launch. I need some time to get keywords into categories in a fairly old account I manage. I believe this will help when the switchover happens as the system runs much more like AdWords.

In priniciple it is like google adwords, but the interface is more like MSN, but more difficult to use. For some reason our sales through Yahoo dropped by 25% after they changed to the new system in the US.

**cyberbird1** · 16-03-07

Yahoo introduced Panama to their top clients on Wednesday in London. They are saying Q2 release.

The new ranking model will follow some weeks later as was the case in the U.S.

The current ranking model lists broad matches below exact matches but when the new model is introduced both matche types will be ranked in the same way. I can see this having an effect on traffic/cost in a lot of cases.