I guess Yahoo! Search doesn’t think it gets enough abuse and they have begun their “spam” campaign to anyone with an email address to get them suckered into their Search Submit Basic … which they have been running through Position Tech for years. The deal is this: You pay Yahoo! $49.00 per URL for a year and you get to be in their … free index.

Nice.

Your only benefit is that their spider will visit your pages every seven days. Um, doesn’t it already do that? Also, the referral rate from the organic area from Yahoo! search is in the single digits these days – plus we have a very nice “mask” in their ad. Let’s check it out:

Now, in looking at the image above, when in the world has Yahoo! only shown three paid ads for a search for a keyword like “flowers”? Yeah, never. I am surprised they showed three – I would have expected two. Basically, Yahoo! is trying to show you that the organic listings have such a large presence on the page, when reality is, it doesn’t.

See the graphic below for proof:

Look at the graphic above (real live search) and compare it to the first graphic which is what Yahoo! is trying to “sell” you. Notice the real search has four paid listings while the ad shows only three. While it may not seem like much, it makes a world of difference in how it looks. Much the same way the fast food restaurants push all the “toppings” to the front of the burger to make it look “overflowing” this is doing much the same.

I would advise you to avoid this program, as it didn’t work years ago when Yahoo! actually had market share, and there is no indication why it would be different now.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.