Yahoo announced today that is will be discontinuing Yahoo Buzz on April 21.

Yahoo announced today that it will be pulling the plug on its article-ranking feature, Yahoo Buzz. The product will be discontinued on April 21, but internet marketers should consider that Buzz aside, social recommendations are increasingly prevalent.

Brafton reported back in December that Yahoo planned to cut Buzz in 2011 with the intention of devoting itself to local and mobile communications. Though Buzz will be canceled in order to let Yahoo focus on “core strengths and new innovations,” the company says “this was a hard decision.”

The decision was probably made harder by the rise of content recommendation tools from other industry leaders, including Google. The search giant's +1 service displays the number of times a result is recommended by users directly in the SERPs, and it is garnering a lot of attention among SEO search and social marketers. Plus, we've reported that social users' recommendations are deemed trusted web referrals.

Buzz may be one of many products Yahoo will be cutting, and the company seems to be struggling on the search front as well. As Brafton has reported, the latest search rankings show that Yahoo lost share in March. Nonetheless, Yahoo's losses were search partner Bing's gains – SEO marketers should take note.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.