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Paying $25 per page is just too cost prohibitive for sites of any size and waiting for Yahoo! to actually getting around to index a large site completely will likely take a few lifetimes at their current pace.
I think that the amount of revenue that Yahoo! would generate through their PFI program would rise dramatically if there were a way to insure that an entire site would be added to their index at one time. Think of the possibilities. This could be a win-win for both Yahoo! and webmasters. Yahoo would get a far greater number of sites joining their PFI program and webmasters would no longer have to sit and wait for their entire site to get indexed.
What would you pay to have your entire site indexed in Y? $100, $500, more?
Ink has Trusted Feed for 500+ page sites:
[positiontech.com...]
I'd guess Yahoo! will probably do something similar.
I buy over 300 terms on Overture and my average cost per click is about 21 cents.
Given that it is unlikely that Yahoo! will see the light and go to aggressive indexing of the web a la Google
They will if they want to compete.
Some sites are a work of passion with little monetization of traffic. They're essential and important to the general well being of the internet.
For these sites, I'm sure webmasters could fork up some $'s comparable to the cost of their hosting. Perhaps this is added to the hosting plan as a few dollars per month by the ISP. (Go McDonalds style with this one.. not Mortons'.)
Some sites are affiliate sites and while they monetize their traffic the ROI is not significant enough to justify trusted feeds, besides, do trusted feeds handle affiliate sites?
Again, I suspect webmasters would pay $'s which are a percentage of their earnings, pennies on the click? Figure out a way to get into the affiliate cut without taking the affiliates out. Keep in mind that many of the affiliates (perhaps a majority?) are hard working put their hearts and souls into their work.
Figure out a flat fee type deal for these folks. $150 per month per site. The site gets a review every quarter and the $150 pays for the bandwidth of the spider and the chunk of HTML spewed out in the serp.
Ecommerce sites would again have to pay comparable to their profits (not sales, mind you) on the click.
Now here's the fun part.. we run all three types of sites, they're essential to our diversification and our survival. Unfortunately, our audience is based in a small part in Asia, who, while they search the US engines for their widgets do not justify spending the huge $'s per page that is currently offered by the various PFI players.
Today we have to deal with a plethora of regional 'hoos and 'tomis and 'oogles which makes it extremely difficult to justify the spend online. We're better of doing PFI in dead-tree media for now. ;)
Add some geotargetting to the PFI and CPC type deals while you're at it -- i.e. if someone from Elbonia searches for black widgets a store selling black widgets in elbonia comes up number 1.
We're getting there slowly... its close, but its no cigar.
If I were Yahoo - and last night I was and people kept typing things into my skull (I work too much) then the only way forward would be to increase free crawling and develop better spam filters. I'm talking ridiculously strong spam filters!
Yahoo has enough commercial content already, what search engine doesn't though, to become more popular they need to return more non-commercial results for the amazing number of non-commercial searches on their search engine.
Google's problem was that they wanted to be the popular kid in the class so they kept listening to what webmasters wanted. As soon as they started pandering to what we want, they became unpopular with the regular users. Google's results are so commercial it's unreal. Yahoo can beat Google by not caring about their popularity with SEO's and just aiming for relevant results.
Yahoo, I feel that if you want a successful search engine that is popular with the world, start dumping your commercial content - 50 commercial results is just as useful to your searchers as 50,000 per search - and start giving users what they want. If that means that some of my sites don't make it onto your search engine, fine, at least when I want to search for something I'll have somewhere to go ...
Based on the cost of consideration into their directory, my big fear with Yahoo is they'll charge a huge fee that people with non-commercial pages or pages that just do smalltime advertising/affiliate stuff won't be able to afford.
Would they stop crawling whitehouse.gov because the PFI check did not come through?
