Ding Dong! Overture Is Dead!

Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 22 of December , 2007 at 4:13 pm

Finally, overture is dead. No one should be surprised.

Overture used to be one of the best tools for keyword research. In direct competition with WordTracker, you could get valuable information from Overture for free. Of course, WordTracker charged a fee. For that fee you could get a little bit more valuable information than you could from Overture, but not much. Until WordTracker started improving its service and left Overture behind.

In 2003, Yahoo! purchased Overture. Shortly after that, they began offering Yahoo! Search Marketing. For a while after that Overture was still fairly useful.

The real death knell for Overture came when the information on keywords it provided started being up to six months old. That’s when it really started to decline because search marketers need the most up to date information. If you are trying to write blog posts or monetize a website around specific keyword phrases that are popular then you need that information to be current. Six-month-old information is just too old. When Overture’s information started falling that far behind, savvy entrepreneurs began developing other search and research tools to compete with WordTracker. Some of them got to be quite popular.

In September, SERoundtable posted that Overture seemed dead. For the better part of this year, Overture has been off line. If you tried to click on its web address from any search or go to the URL (inventory.overture.com) where you’d typically find the keyword suggestion tool, you’d get an error page, or a message saying the website is temporarily unavailable. In fact, type in that URL now and that’s exactly what you’ll see.

Search marketers keep hoping Overture will come back, bigger and better than before. But I’m not holding my breath. I really think Overture is dead. Who’s going to trust them now?

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Category: PPC Keyword Research, Search Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing

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