Yahoo! Beefs Up Local Organic Results

Yahoo! announced that it will make a considerable change to its result pages, and the content it will allow Web sites to provide in organic listings.

According to the Yahoo! Search Blog:

Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Yahoo! calls out Yelp specifically as being a beneficiary of this move, in being able to have direct links to its reviews for specific businesses when searches are done for those businesses (users are a primary beneficiary too). Yelp’s deep review content currently makes it very SEO friendly and it often does rank well in result pages for local businesses with lots of reviews.

But what’s different about this is the structured presentation of organic listings, in the spirit of the “blended” search results users are coming to expect. In that way, this is yet another move toward universal search, blended search, whatever you want to call it. I’ll be at SMX West tomorrow where Yahoo! has a big presence, and I’ll find out as much as I can.

Before & After (care of the Yahoo! Search Blog):