For those of us who have been doing SEO since the 1990’s and feel rather nostalgic toward the evolution of search and the Internet its is with great remorse that the official Yahoo Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has finally made it into the Otherworld Wide Web above. Of course, the Yahoo Overture Tool has been down for month as nostalgic types such as myself click on the Favorite every so often to see if there has been a breath left in this SEO assistant or not.

But, now the Tool redirects permanently to the Yahoo Small Business page to entice visitors to try search marketing with the beleaguered Web property. Yahoo finally figured out that the Overture Tool still had enough fans and traffic that it was of value to redirect this URL to a webpage to gain a little business.

Before Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, the Overture Tool was really the only game in town. Yes, it was an imperfect tool as many of the results were out of order and sometimes conflicted wildly with the results of the other tools once they came online. But, the Overture Tool at least gave the SEO some direction as to if a particular keyword phrase was popular or not. Sometimes it was accurate and sometimes not, but at least phrases could be tested, verified and validated based upon the Overture Tool searches.

My wish for the Yahoo Overture Tool would have been to put up an historical page with a little detail about how it came about, number of visitors and why it was abandoned and just keep it there for archival purposes. But, Yahoo chose to go a different direction and simply redirect just for the sake putting something there rather than “Page Not Found.” It’s not poetic but it is what it is. Now, if they can ever get their Yahoo Publisher Network out of beta, that would be poetic.

Filed under: Yahoo