Jeremy leaves Yahoo!

Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo!. That’s pretty huge news.

Wihle Jeremy and I have playfully jousted in the past, I have nothing but respect for Jeremy — to the point where we joked for April Fool’s Day a couple years ago about switching blogs. I’ve enjoyed being on search panels with him before, and he’s been a fantastic communicator on Yahoo’s behalf. I picked up several blogging tips from listening to him, including how to avoid getting a “talking to” by your company. The secret, according to Jeremy’s presentation a few years ago, was not to talk much about your CEO. πŸ™‚

I think a ton of good karma will follow Jeremy wherever he goes next. It sounds like it has something to do with open-source, which is great for him and (I’m guessing) for open-source as well. My hunch has always been that Jeremy pushed hard for Yahoo’s open strategy behind the scenes, and I hope that Yahoo continues that effort. Jeremy, good luck in whatever comes next, and keep us posted!

20 Responses to Jeremy leaves Yahoo! (Leave a comment)

  1. Well, he defo put they years in with Yahoo! Hmmm, will certainly be interesting to see the spin the press put on this… Highly amusing in some cases, I’m sure. :Roles eyes:

    *Cracks open a can of spam*
    Cheers!
    jb

  2. Not to be that guy but you misspelled the first word.

  3. I wish you Jeremy all the best and good luck and success in future.

    And special thanks for this evergreen post of yours back in 2006, where you quoted:

    “A wise man once said “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

    Very wise words indeed.

  4. First I do not think Jeremy did a very good job at all as far as trying to help webmasters. In fairness to Jeremy this is most likely do to the fact that Yahoo is a terrible company regarding giving any support or help to webmasters and shows how this hurt Yahoo and helped Google take over. I always felt like he knew he worked for a very defective company and why bother even trying, sorry. I bet he is very happy to get out of Yahoo.

    I think Yahoo would be lucky if MSN purchased them for $5 per share. I think Yahoo is going down the tubes and that the FTC should go after Yahoo for it’s paid inclusion scam. They can not mix paid and non paid search results and present them to the general public as all non paid results. That is clearly wrong and against FTC regulations. They need to clearly identify what are paid results and what are non paid results. I do not understand why the FTC let Yahoo get away with a scam against the general public like this. Yahoo makes about $200,000,000 per year from their paid inclusion scam.

  5. Thanks, Matt!

    We should do lunch one of these days. I hear they’re free at your place. πŸ™‚

  6. Tom Forrest, Jeremy’s job was not really webmaster-y stuff. I believe he was more of a driving force for the Yahoo Developer Network and Yahoo’s openness strategy.

    Jeremy Zawodny, I’d love for you to stop by anytime. The lunches are free here, or I’ll even buy the lunch if you don’t want to visit the Googleplex. πŸ™‚

  7. Hi,

    Yes it is nice you two are friends. Jeremy could not even tell me who does do webmaster-y stuff at Yahoo. As far as I can tell no one does, which is part of the problem. Anyway it appears it would be best for me to not say any more, since I have nothing positive to say about Yahoo.

  8. That’s why the natural search results on Yahoo look kinda hard to figure out sometimes, there is a little funny business going on… I have always thought that Yahoo could possibly go to an all paid version of search pretty soon, but I never really could figure out how they would do it… People don’t like being presented with all paid results – but Yahoo has figured out a way to do it while keeping 99.9% of people in the dark…

    There are many people who benefit greatly from some of this…. I have had my Yahoo issues in the past, so I understand your frustration with Yahoo customer service, but I have no complaints with them these days… All I know is that eventually someone will have to talk about their paid inclusion programs and exactly how they work, detail by detail, and I wouldn’t want to be the Yahoo rep in that discussion.. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies….

  9. Tom:

    Yahoo doesn’t have the same sort of webmaster-y outreach that Google does. I wish we did.

    Matt:

    Exactly right on my job. πŸ™‚ I’ll ping you sometime on lunch. Heck, there are a few others around there I ought to say Hi to.

  10. Wow, this is the 2nd post I’ve seen in just a few minutes on Jeremy Zawodny leaving Yahoo! Shoemoney referred to him as one of the companies “Most Respected Employees.” Says something about an industry that is supportive of talent and respectful of one another. Cheers!

  11. It’s a zero-sum game, I think. A “ton of good karma” that will follow Jeremy will be leaving Yahoo for good…

  12. @Jeremy and @Matt

    Of the two of you, I’m not sure which one of you requires less Advil to ease headaches.

    1. Google’s communication with Webmasters isn’t always well taken and I’m sure Matt gets his fair share of heartache.

    2. Yahoo’s lack of communication – er yea…

    I’ve always had a problem with Yahoo’s non-communication. Majority of my issues come from the lack of Customer Service for paid products. Such as the Directory or Yahoo Ads. It’s like Microsoft, if you contact their office, you are sent to an offshore office, where there is little understood and nothing accomplished – so I bought an iMac. This was my experience with Yahoo and therefore, we removed all ads and padded the Google budget.

    It wasn’t until 2 years ago, when I approached Tim at PubCon – he put me in touch directly with someone in Search where we able to move past our dislike for Yahoo. Communication is key – I could never understand why Yahoo continued to close communications with advertisers – it was their main downfall, don’t they know that it’s best to have 1 million $10,000 advertisers than one $1,000,000,000 advertiser? (See -> Google Adwords.)

    Anyway… Goodluck with your move Jeremy! I hope it’s a positive one, and please be sure to let us all know where you are (You gotta love that link juice we’ll pass on for ya!)

  13. Hello Asia,

    I was looking for a way to contact you on your web site. I did not find any way to contact you. Would you please email me at:

    tomforrest@htpcompany.com

    I want to ask for your help with all my years of Yahoo problems, perhaps you can give me a contact at Yahoo. I sent an email directly to Jeremy asking for his help and he has not repled to me. I did not want to do any more Yahoo bashing on Matt’s blog.

    Also I have some good SEO articles I wanted to show you.

    I hope to hear from you.

  14. Google is smart in the webmaster outreach.

    Yahoo marketing folk do appear to overlook the webmasters. It is possible they do not know that the webmasters determine advertising placement and spending for the vast majority of small to mid-size business web sites?
    Maybe.

  15. “the opportunity to work in a much smaller company recently presented itself and it was simply too interesting to pass up. I’ll say more about that in the coming weeks.”

    I can’t wait to hear what his next project is about… any clues out there I’ve missed?

  16. I thought Jeremy did a fantastic job. Folks like Matt and Jeremy didn’t go into this biz with any idea they’d become so vertically famous for it, or become such convenient targets for criticism. I doubt most of us would last a week having to endure it while also having to smile through it.

  17. I heard that Jeremy was a great guy. He was a hard worker.
    So i wish him the best there.

  18. You guys have destroyed Yahoo! You should be ashamed of yourself!

  19. Hi I was compelled to join in as I find Yahoo! extremely annoying, not only are the useful services/pages I like to use unavailable most of the time but when I asked the search submit pro sales team in the uk if we could setup as an approved agency and carry out this activity for our clients, (client had particularly requested this) Yahoo! responded that actually Yahoo!
    “does not have enough resources within the company to do all the background work, so please don’t sell this into your clients and by the way we don’t have the resources to train you either” in my opinion this is complete waste of their employees talents, skills and ideas and I cannot see Yahoo taking over the search world just yet, if this is the attitude they have to paid submissions.

  20. The fact that he is joining Craigslist tells me volumes in terms of why he wanted to leave yahoo. A closed box called yahoo will truly be a pandora’s box. Craig’s list should be so much fun now with Jeremy’s free spirit. Congrats, Jeremy.

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