Forum Moderators: open
We supplement this free crawl with the paid inclusion program, which allows us to add dynamic database content and other content that we could not otherwise discover and crawl. Currently less than 1% of our index is content that is included via our inclusion programs.
Our paid inclusion programs provide a superior way for sites to interact with us in a clearly structured fashion. These sites get the following
benefits:
1) Control over which URLs they include in the index (subject to content
guidelines)
2) Frequent refresh
3) Clearly defined way to interact with us (for example: clear feed
specifications)
4) Quality review and consultation (for feed customers)
5) Detailed reporting to track and optimize performance
6) Customer service
Participation in Yahoo!'s paid inclusion program does not guarantee rank in the search results. URLs are ranked in search results in the same way as all other URLs from the free crawl. The key drivers of ranking are keyword-specific relevance and site quality, as assessed by our regular search relevance algorithms with input from the quality review process.
(Note that Inktomi Index Connect clients are receiving Yahoo! Search traffic going forward, and Inktomi Search Submit customers are receiving a free trial of Yahoo! traffic until 4/15/04.)
We will also be launching free URL submission during the week of 3/1. This service allows content providers to suggest that the crawler should visit a site during the main crawl cycle. This service is different than paid inclusion in two ways:
1) There is no guarantee that we will crawl and include the URL in the index.
2) As this site potentially could be added to the main crawl, Yahoo! Slurp will follow links from that URL.
This service will reside on the Yahoo.com site and be accessible via a Yahoo! login. This service has been available for the AltaVista and Alltheweb Indices previously and the tradition will continue with Yahoo! Search.
Thank you for your reply.
Your confidence is somewhat assuring.... I like many others will be patient because if we do not necessarily trust Yahoo - we trust you who embodies the organization.
Thank you.
ARC
Well said!
Do the right thing.....
I grew up in Brooklyn...sometimes those were the last words ever heard. ;-)
ARC
Just to get things in balance for people who have had no experience with INK PFI - many of us have also not been burned by INK over the years.
But then we're talking 30 cents a click for my category. For some overture keywords, we're talking about less than that per click anyways for top two or three placement.
I'm enjoying being in the results since I'm in the Inktomi database right now, but these search engines are really sucking me dry.
I'm getting 1000 hits/month from ink right now. 1000 * .3 = $300 / month which is a HUGE expense to be in the yahoo database if I should expect similar results. Especially when you add the fact that I have to pay for overture at $250-500 / month as well.
It seems to me to be REALLY expensive.
Just to get things in balance for people who have had no experience with INK PFI - many of us have also not been burned by INK over the years.
Fair enough. I guess we would all have been better off if we would have never paid them in the first place. Our problems only began after we paid them $2500 FOR 100 URL'S. When we didn't renew for another year all listings associated with those domains (paid & unpaid ) disapeared within a few weeks. We even tried to get them back by paying for some of them again. No luck. Position Tech was happy to take our money, but those domains remained completely out of their index. We wrote to them and were told that if our site(s) were removed from the index we must have done something wrong. Mind you they never said WHAT we did wrong, just that we must have done something wrong. I really believe that what we did wrong was NOT to pay them another $2500 before the URL's expired.
Why not, if its all based on the same content guidelines? IMO this is what many are stumbling over in their efforts to understand the equity between pfi and Yahoo's stated goal to find every page on the web.
Brin and Page.
However, from a strictly PR standpoint I have to say that I think Yahoo has blown it and has probably lost any chance they had of competing with Google for the high ground in the new search engine wars. Tim, I think you guys should have waited until you had a few months of Google-competitive results under your belt before rolling something like SiteMatch out. As it stands now Yahoo has given many in the webmaster community the impression that they're just out to make a quick buck, possible at the expense of the integrity of their index. You could have the greatest, most Google-kicking results in the world next week, but everyone will still be looking for those few listings that seem out of place, wondering if they're seeing covert capitalism at work.
Yahoo's failure to either contact or explain this new Yahoo! program to its existing FAST/INKTOMI customers - before its public announcement - or since - underlines Yahoo's commitment to customer service.....
And the Positiontech reporting system was offline for 3 days at the beginning of March - and now the new system seems to have no summary history available, and NO click through data on several hundred URLS.....
Customer Service.
my God, I see the hate mail coming already.
I hope that you (and Yahoo) are listening to what is being said here. Really we are giving excellent free advise for Yahoo. This forum is possibly the cheapest way to get a market survey from the top people in the know on search engines. I feel that most of us would agree that there should be a balance between paid and natural listings. When done properly (as in Google pre-Florida) there can be a huge profit. Google recently made a wrong choice to try to increase its revenue by sacreficing the natural serps, this is Yahoo golden opportunity to really take charge. So far I believe Yahoo has done so, with its more relevent serps. However, this "new" idea of paid inclusion is a step back for Yahoo. It will become a rally call for Google supporters and will hurt Yahoo. I would strongly recommend that Yahoo drop this inclusion idea because it just doesn't make sense. Instead Yahoo should concentrate on building it index and defeating Google by being larger, faster, and more relevent. Relevency was what brought Google to its heights, users want relevency and localty on the web can be won. Yahoo has the opportunity to take this cornerstone from Google. Carpe Diem Yahoo!
Thank you for your input - I know I've been a thorn in your side here. But after my experience with Inktomi (and you were their spokesman here at that time) I'm not about to take a chance and get burned again.
Plus the technology you are pushing for Yahoo is Inktomi - same people and same programing and likely the same algo.
You can't open a page on the Internet that it doesn't have Google adSense on it. Like Google why doesn't Yahoo consider sharing the wealth rather than bleeding the customer.
Google is a win/win for everybody, the searcher, the web developer and Google.
Yahoo is like a toll booth forcing payment and Google is like a gift shop offering an opportunity to get something nice...
Just some thoughts.
-s-
Steve we have a crawl that feeds 99% of the content in our index for free.
If Y had 1 million paid inclusion pages, plus another 99 million free crawl pages, the statement above would be accruate. At the same time, if the remaining billions of pages on the Web had not been crawled yet, the SERP's would be useless.
The real question is what percentage of crawlable pages are 1) crawled, 2) in the index, and 3) actually appearing in the SERP's for relevant kw searches. That's where the issue is.
There will be significant changes to the crawl and Index over the next weeks so please be patient.
That seems like the most positive assertion yet and it's most welcome. If Y says there's much more to come, great. That comments at least acknowledges what many of us see: That there are still large numbers of pages not showing in the index.
The new Yahoo Search Technology is evolving over time and we are messaging our mission and our goals for the future.
That's fair. Any company that doesn't do that is dead in the water ;)
Right now we are working towards that goal and I understand based on the data that you have right now we need to keep working on becoming more comprehensive.
Yes, absolutely. But again, very encouraging!
...I think changes are being made for the better but you are not able to see the affects of these changes in the live index yet.
Awesome! At least that sounds like a promise of great improvements soon to come.
Hate to be a nudge, but any idea if we're talking days versus weeks versus months?
If you pay for one page it will not affect other pages in the index.
Tim if we can take this comment, and all you other comments above to the bank, then you'll have a lot of converted believers in here. Some of us may be skeptical based a little on past experience with INK, and a lot on what we're seeing *today* in the SERP's (since past history with INK is not relevant, but today's search results are). I'd wager that 99.99% of us are eager to believe what you say above, and more importantly, to actually see the proof of the pudding. Hopefully in days, not months. ;-)
And I'm sure a lot of other people are saying the same thing. Inktomi generated a tremendous amount of bad will by taking people's money, then banning their sites.
Yahoo now carries the Inktomi luggage. The best thing Yahoo could do is go back and either un-ban those sites or return a pro-rated amount of the money people payed.
Does this statement suggest that it is possible to PFI a page, and later unsubscribe, and remain indexed and similarly ranked, without incurring on-going cpc fees?
Yup! I don't mean to sound bitter but I've just about sworn off Yahoo unless there's going to be changes in the upcoming week(s) that'll move mountains, or at least a few hilltops.
Why in the world would one (like myself who's got 100s of penalised pages) want to pay just to spend months if not a year trying to sort this all out through optimisation in hopes of possibly, hopefully fixing things to Yahoo's liking? I'd sooner put my money on Google (which I don't mind you), and continue to see the great returns I get through Google.
I'm weary of Yahoo, but I'm keeping my eyes open just in case such changes DO in fact take place.
Side Note: AlltheWeb and AltaVista have been aggressively crawling my sites lately...so much so that they've actually surpassed Google. Makes me wonder what is up.
Just as Jerry McGuire was forced to yell the following words, I say the same thing to Yahoo: 'show me the money', Show Me The Money', SHOW ME THE MONEY.'
;)
Can we take this at face value Tim? Are you prepared to state categorically that paying does not and will not influence ranking AT ALL?
That surely is the most import issue. Certainly, as a user, a search engine which returns sites based on payment is going to be of little value to me in the long run. A bit like MSN I guess when they had page after page of it before the real results came up. That's why so few people use them relative yo yourselves and Google.
Can we have that assurance?
I've never taken any PFI's and was planning to try Ink PFI the other day. I don't usually participate in the PFI forum, but I do sometimes participate in this one. So if Ink just takes money does nothing in return, why bother PFI? I could just use the same amount of money as a budget to Google AdWords and start earning almost (or more than) double the amount of clicks!
Thanks guys.
Sid
Speaking only for myself, I have no issue at at with Y wanting to run the paid inclusion program, as long as it has no influence on the SERP's, and doesn't somehow prevent non paid pages from appearing, regardless of whether the non paid pages are from a site that has some paid pages, or are from a site where no pages were ever paid for.
Indeed there are good reasons for a SiteMatch program, if you have tons of pages that are hard to find, or that update frequently, or because you simply are willing to pay the price for extra service.
Some might say it's naive to expect that the program could be fair with paid pages, but if the free index is comparable to the thoroughness of G's (it's not close right now), and if the paid pages simply get updated more often and customers get help with problems from Y customer service, that would seem on paper at least to be a reasonable approach.
There's also the potential issue of the feeds being unfair. But *if* the SERP's are thorough and clean, and *if* the paid program has *no* influence on the SERP's (feeds or no feeds), then I say, go ahead Y! and make your money. Fees for extra service is hardly a new concept.
Just wanting to be fair here. :-)
That's right. I too agree that paid inclusion should never have a favorable impact on the rankings of pages. But for God's Sake, work with the customer in sorting out problems. Therein lies the problem.
Oh wait, did you say "customer service"? hahaha, that's a rich laugh.
How many times you want the guy to say the same thing? Give it a rest.
Yahoo has said paid pages won't get a ranking boost. Now wait patiently to see if that comes to pass.
Yahoo has to prove this, just like they have to prove they can crawl the Internet adequately, and that they can fix their bizarro redirect penalty/problem.
Only time will tell. Saying "are we there yet" over and over won't make the time go faster....
[webmasterworld.com...]
[edited by: Tim at 10:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 7, 2004]
The answer to this question will put to rest many of the other questions here.
-s-
if a page is participating in sitematch, and is naturally being found by slurp, what happens to the indexed page when cpc spending limits are reached? does the page drop out of the index?
