Yahoo! and Overture's new paid inclusion program

Overture (owned by Yahoo!) has launched a new paid inclusion program for the Yahoo! search engine. The program also ensures inclusion in search results at AlltheWeb, AltaVista, MSN and other search sites.

Yahoo! has launched a new search engine that will replace its present search engines , and that is already powering its mighty Yahoo.com portal (see separate article on the death of AltaVista and AlltheWeb).

The index of the new search engine is partly based on the old Inktomi database, but the new Yahoo! Slurp spider is crawling the Web, following links and indexing pages.

According to Tim Mayer, a Yahoo! spokesman taking part in Webmaster World discussions, Yahoo! will update the index with a daily crawl to gather newly created and fast-changing URLs, and with a main crawl which updates the index incrementally twice per week.

Yahoo! will shortly add a form for free search engine submission.

Paid inclusion

However, Yahoo! has also decided to launch a new paid inclusion program called Overture Site Match, which asks user to pay to get included in the database.

According to Mayer paying sites get the following benefits:

• Control over which URLs they include in the index
• Frequent refresh
• Clearly defined way to interact with Yahoo!
• Quality review and consultation for so-called "feed customers"
• Detailed reporting to track and optimize performance
• Customer service

Ranking

He underlines that paying sites will not get a better ranking than others: "The key drivers of ranking are keyword-specific relevance and site quality, as assessed by our regular search relevance algorithms with input from the quality review process."

However, there is a catch. To Search Engine Watch Tim Cadogan, vice president of search for Yahoo!, says that Site Match gives Yahoo! more "meta information" about your site, and that will allow them "to position you to users more appropriately."

He continues: "If you're a good site that's going to be great for you, and if your site is bad, it's probably going to hurt you." Hence participation in the program may influence your ranking.

Most of all this applies to participants in the Site Match Xchange program, i.e. customers that would like to include more than 1000 pages. These are the so-called "feed customers" referred to by Mayer. These customers will give Yahoo!/Overture an XML file containing information on what pages that are to be included and about the content of these pages.

This gives participants in the Xchange program a unique opportunity to influence the search engine's "idea" about what the page is about, and hence also its ranking.

Yes, Yahoo!/Overture will control this customer supplied "meta description" of the page, but a good search engine optimization expert will now how to manipulate it (cp. Webmaster World discussion).

Pricing

The program is pretty expensive, and the pricing will probably scare away most "mom and pop" sites and others with a small budget.

First you have to pay a fee to get a page included: an annual fee of US$49 for the first page, US$ 29 each for the next nine, and US$ 10 each for the 11th URL and beyond.

And that's not all. Unlike previous pay for inclusion programs, Yahoo!/Overture will ask you to pay for each click through. Every time someone clicks on one of your listings, you will have to pay Overture 15 or 30 cents depending on the category your site belongs to.

Credibility

Now, pay-per-click is normally something we associate with regular sponsored text ads. Yahoo! is therefore taking a huge risk, as the credibility of its search results may be compromised. Discussions in online forums clearly show that Yahoo! has a problem regarding the legitimacy of these listings.

Google has never launched a paid inclusion scheme, mainly because the company feels that such a program may lead searchers to doubt the fairness of the search algorithm.

What is to stop Yahoo! from giving the pages of paying sites an extra boost in the rankings? webmasters ask. The risk of being caught, probably. It would be a publicity disaster for Yahoo! if it became known that its algorithm was tweaked in favor of paying sites.

However, Yahoo! does not have to change its algorithm to help paying customers.

Value added

Yahoo! must give paying customer some added value, and well respected search engine optimization experts argue, that, yes, taking part in Site Match is worth the investment. There are several reasons for this:

• Your site will be revisited regularly (every 48 hours). This gives you the chance to tweak the content of your pages, in order to improve your ranking. Moreover, you are able to present up to date listings to searchers. For a continously changing shopping site this is very important.
• If the pages are accepted by the Yahoo! controllers, you are guaranteed that your pages are listed fast. You don't have to wait for the Yahoo! spider to find them (which can take weeks, if not months).
• Moreover, your pages will remain in the index as long as you pay, and as long as you follow the rules of the program.
• You also get access to Yahoo!/Overture's team of advisers. They will not give you access to the Yahoo! algorithm, but they will probably tell you how you can improve your rankings, at least if they find that your site provides relevant information. (Of course, this only proves that paid inclusion may be used to influence search results.)
• You get access to visitor statistics. You may get some of the same information by analyzing your weblogs, but Yahoo!/Overture will probably add some more relevant data.

That being said, there is so far no proof for the claim that Yahoo! will not list quality sites for free. In order to provide searchers with high quality search results, they must include relevant non-paying sites and pages.

Indeed, Yahoo! has announced that it will widen its program to non-profit sites. Many of them will be included in the Site Match program for free. This applies, for instance, to sites like National Public Radio), the US Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Project Gutenberg, and the National Science Foundationās online library.

This also allows Yahoo! to include informational content that is "hidden" in databases, and that cannot be crawled by regular search engine spiders.

This Public Site Match Program and its commercial sibling is together known as the Content Acquisition Program (CAP).

Overture Site Match home page.

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