SEO Consultant Esoos Bobnar

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Yahoo Makes a Del.icio.us Acquisition

Now that Yahoo has purchased social bookmarking site Del.icio.us for a rumored $40 million or so, I just have one request of them: PLEASE don't change it. Don't gunk it up with a bunch of features that we don't need. It's clean and simple and that's exactly why we like it.

Of course, Yahoo did do a pretty good job not messing up Flickr, so I have faith they'll be good to Del.icio.us, too. (However, if Yahoo does mess it up, does this open up an oppurtunity for another player in the social bookmarking field to become the new Del.icio.us?)

It's easy to see why the service appealed to Yahoo, since Del.icio.us has a fairly large installed user-base (~300,000) and a hell of a lot of pages tagged. Once the (likely incorrect) notion that ranking high on Yahoo Search can be accomplished by tagging your pages with your top keywords, it's certainly possible we'll see a degradation in Del.icio.us quality due to a huge influx in tag-spam. That'll be a shame, but I think Del.icio.us is robust enough to handle a little tragedy of the commons.

While it's possible that Yahoo may decide to use these tags to a certain degree to determine a page's relevancy (and popularity), the system's susceptibility to spamming will probably limit that. Besides, as I mentioned in a recent post on Del.icio.us tagging, the real benefit from sites like Del.icio.us lies not in spamming them, but rather using them to creatively promote your best content.

AP has a bit, as do the Yahoo and Del.icio.us blogs, and (I think) TechCrunch was among the first to pick up the story.

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