Can you feel the ground shaking beneath your website? Have you heard the news about Yahoo’s new Site Match program?
Yahoo officially announced its new Content Acquisition Program (CAP), as part of (as they put it) a continuing effort to enhance search quality and comprehensiveness. CAP is divided into two channels, the non-commercial channel called Public Site Match, and the commercial channel, Overture Site Match.
For Public Site Match, Yahoo is working with several content providers from government, academia and other non-profit sectors like NPR, Northwestern University, The Library of Congress, and other partners. The goal of this program is to improve the quality and depth of content users can access.
Overture Site Match is Yahoo’s new Paid Inclusion program. As stated in the press release (http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1144.html): “it allows commercial content providers to effectively submit Web content, update it frequently, obtain additional target leads and track and optimize their performance”.
Are they enhancing their submission/inclusion model? Yes. But they are using this opportunity to change the fee structure in a radical way. I am already not a big fan of flat-fee paid inclusion. Now they are going even further: under this program, Yahoo will charge you for each click to your site. The new fee structure is as follows:
$ 50 deposit (this is the cost-per-click reserve minimum) $ 49 for reviewing and indexing of your index page $ 29 for each additional page (between 2 and 10) $ 10 for each additional page from the same domain
The cost-per-click is between 15 and 30 cents, depending on the category you choose for your site. So a site that receives, say 50 clicks per day from Yahoo, will be charged between $7.50 and $15 per day (or $2,737 to $5,475 per year) under the new program.
To those who feel the program is not right for them, Yahoo says that it’s OK, because they probably already have your web pages in the regular crawl. If not, then they are working on getting them in over time, and they provide a free URL suggestion mechanism to get the crawler’s attention: http://submit.search.yahoo.com. Yahoo also says it will absolutely not boost the ranking of paid listings.
I think Yahoo is going too far. First, it’s wonderful that Yahoo provides a value-added service to those who need to submit their content more frequently and/or in a more structured way, but this does not justify the introduction of a pay-per-click model. Yahoo says that without pay-per-click pricing, content providers have no incentive to provide high quality content. I think this kind of incentive is a bit too convenient for Yahoo, and it will actually kill good content, not encourage it. Second, it is clear that the quality of the crawler will decrease over time with this model, so Site Match can have some room to grow. How many sites suggested or discovered for free will actually be indexed remains to be seen. Third, how can Yahoo truly treat free and paid listings equally if it has more metadata and/or provides special optimization advice to paid listings? Finally, Yahoo will need to convince the FTC that it’s alright to include paid listings in the normal search results without labeling them as such.
This is all very disappointing, to say the least, from the pioneer in internet search. I think Yahoo should reconsider their pay-for-inclusion program, before it’s too late. I am glad to see Yahoo actively compete with Google again, but the road it is taking right now is, I think, very slippery.
Article by Dom Vonarburg
Founder, Add Me.com
Copyright 2004
