Why use Alta Vista & FAST Paid Inclusion?

Overture makes AV / FAST inclusion worthless?

[fctoma]

I've been doing SEO for almost 6 years now and I've figured out that Overture's purchase of FAST and AV...really makes the A.V. and FAST paid inclusion programs quite worthless, unless you're not in the top three rankings with Overture PPC listins...

Since Overture's purchase of those two companies...their top three results are displayed on AV and FAST's results, and I'm assuming all the portals those two supply results to.... so, why should anyone continue to pay for paid inclusion when they can achieve better results (in most cases) depending on the PPC pricing.

Best to all of you, now go fishing :)

Frank
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[edited by: engine at 3:45 pm (utc) on May 14, 2003]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[seth_wilde]

I don't think Overture's purchase really changed anything (they were already supplying sponsored results to AV, Lycos, Fast, etc)

It all comes down to ROI, If the top 3 overture bids are out of your range then PFI is going to look very attractive. Also in many cases it's possible to pull a good ROI on both Overture and PFI at the same time (And it's Great for branding to show up in #1 in both the sponsored results and the web results).

[skibum]

Generally AV and FAST don't send enough traffic to make PFI worthwhile. This was the case (for our markets anyway) both before and after the Overture purchase.

[fctoma]

I agree....my gut instinct is too keep a few of our core "Keyword Type targeted pages" but drop the 20 or more after that. There is really no way of tracking this marketing methods ROI 100%, mostly a pick and choose game. Even with paid inclusion, Google still kills them all. We get 30K or more a month of visitors...but Google is supplying 90% of them.

Franko