Search Engine Changes.... YAHOO!'S PAID-INCLUSION PROGRAM Having recently dropped Google in favour of Inktomi, Yahoo! has now unveiled a new paid-inclusion program under its Overture brand. Dubbed SiteMatch, the program offers site owners: Control over which URL's they include in the index (subject to content guidelines) Frequent refresh A clearly defined way to interact with Yahoo! (for example: clear feed specifications) Quality review and consultation (for feed customers) Detailed reporting to track and optimize performance Customer service According to a Yahoo! representative, "participation in Yahoo!'s paid inclusion program does not guarantee rank in the search results. All URL's are ranked by the same criteria: keyword-specific relevance and site quality, no matter whether the URL was added to the Index by a free crawl or via Yahoo!'s paid inclusion program." Yahoo! also announced a free submission program, which offers the possibility of being crawled but offers no guarantees as to when, how often or how deep Yahoo! Slurp will go into your site. Details on the paid-inclusion service, including pricing and the free URL submission form, are located at: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html Unfortunately, in addition to charging an annual review fee per URL, Yahoo! is imposing additional per-click-through fees on all traffic received. In its current state, the program only makes sense for large ecommerce or subscription sites in competitive industries. The only upside of the program having a pay-per-click component is that Yahoo! will be incentives to provide tips and ideas to customers as to how they can improve the quality of their pages, and in turn, show up higher in the search results.
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