Paid Inclusion Search Engines -
How do the recent changes really affect you?

If you are actively working with search engines to boost the performance of your website then the past few weeks has been a turbulent time with many changes. With Yahoo dropping Google listings for Inktomi, and then announcing that all of their combined feed properties will create a universal single feed, things from the outside must have looked complicated. Then Ask Jeeves made a surprise announcement that they were dropping their paid inclusion program claiming it wasn’t working for them. This confused the issue further questioning the recent upbeat focus on paid for inclusion. So the overall question is for the business trying to make heads or tails of the whole thing -  ‘how do these changes affect me and my company?’

The answer is two fold. Firstly it’s going to be a question of deciphering what is best for your company and website and the second is to determine the cost implications involved.

Firstly let’s clear up the Ask Jeeves issue. In many respects it didn’t need Ask Jeeves stating that their paid inclusion program didn’t work as many companies and search engine marketers who have worked with the program would have echoed this message based upon results. The UK Ask Jeeves paid inclusion feed was no exception to this especially as it was, on average, more expensive that any other program with poor return on investment. So in some respects the impact here is minimal. Jeeves is going to continue the single URL submission program that holds some value but more importantly they have recently acquired ‘Interactive Search Holdings’ in a $343m deal to develop other strategies and means for users to access information and greatly increases their reach into the internet population. As a mechanism this will make Ask Jeeves a stronger tool going forward.

Yahoo on the other hand has been developing their paid inclusion program over the past 12 months, ever since acquiring Inktomi in late ’02 early ’03. They have honed this program’s relevance and quality of content culminating in its replacement of Google listings in Yahoo’s SERP (Search Engine Results Provider) listings in February 2004. Yahoo’s development in this area was further compounded last year with their acquisition of Overture whom had also recently snapped up AltaVista and FAST (Alltheweb). In a decisive move, announced at Search Engine Strategies in New York in early March, a single feed universal feed has emerged that will power all of the previous companies listings. For the foreseeable future this feed will provide results to Yahoo, AltaVista, Alltheweb and provide SERPs to many other sites.

So what does this mean for your company and your website? The answer is mixed, on the plus side there is a universal feed that exists to get you into some of the top web properties quickly and easily, the down side is that your previous listings in Google are no more and so is the cost saving of a zero cost per click from the Google / Yahoo relationship.

Getting into the Yahoo will follow the same principles as getting into Inktomi prior to the change. One major note is that the submission process will be managed by Overture (a Yahoo! company) and there are two options available:

Overture Site Match (formerly Search Submit) is designed for sites with less than 1,000 URLs (pages). Submitting a page URL for a fixed annual charge of $49 (27 GBP) for the first URL, $29 (14 GBP) for the next 9 URLs and then $10 (6 GBP) for every URL thereafter your site will be listed within 48hours of submission and ranked according to your site’s relevancy to the subject. Additionally to the one time fee, and an additional charge to the former Search Submit, for every click that you receive from these listings you will pay between $0.15 and $0.30 a click based upon category.

Overture Site Match xChange™ (Formerly Index Connect) is designed for sites with more than 1,000 URLs (pages) and is based upon a bulk submission of data. These listings are particularly important for sites that have large catalogues or databases of content such as publishers or retailers. Payment is determined by click volume and the cost per click (CPC) is set according to industry. Again these listings are indexed within 48hours and ranked according the relevancy of site content to search subject matter.

The most important variable to be aware of in each of these programs is the relevancy aspect of your submission. Overture’s technology for Site Match is a search engine at heart and as a result you’ll need to make sure that your site contains variables that give you a good rank. For search submit making sure you’ve got optimised code for the search algorithm is important, keywords, page titles, descriptions and relevant link popularity all help towards a prominent position. For Site Match Xchange™ the best results come from utilising a search firm to optimise your bulk content, something that is particularly key in formatting the feed in a designated fashion.

In summary these changes have been a long time coming, yet at the same time the roll out has been very fast with little actually mentioned about the UK. In the next few weeks this will become clearer with a select number of companies offering paid inclusion via this method for the UK market. The overall key in this is to make sure that all activity is tracked against ROI. Traditionally paid inclusion can yield stronger more relevant visitors who produce a better conversion rate. The advantage to search marketers of having a choice of places to list a company (i.e. AltaVista or Inktomi etc) has been taken away and there is going to be a trial basis to determine how well a single feed will do for companies who are tracking their progress. In the short term however, it’s of paramount importance to determine whether replacing your Google listings in Yahoo will provide dividends.

For more information on Site Match use the following websites:

For Overture Site Match:

http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/sm.jhtml

http://www.positiontech.com/ds-overture.html

For Overture Site Match Xchange™:

http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/sm.jhtml

http://www.highlander.co.uk/solutions/marketing-solutions/marketing-solutions_home.cfm

http://www.inceptor.com/

About the Author

James is an Account Director for Inceptor Inc. and operates from their US based headquarters in Boston. James is the former eMarketing lecturer at South Bank University and also writes for Payperclickanalyst.com - an online magazine for search engine marketing and pay per click search engines. You can contact James by emailing him at anytime at:
james.colborn@inceptor.com