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While Yahoo doesn't have the same search reach that Google does, I think it is important to ensure that other search engines do not follow suit and recognize the PR nightmare that this is for Yahoo.
Businesses which have a model based on free, search engine optomized traffic, should take the opportunity to use what influence they have to educate their customers and the public at large that because of Yahoo's new 'paid' algorithm, their results will be incomplete and inadequate for both Shopping and general information.
For people who are looking for alternative search engines, you could recommend Google which has Froogle for shopping and its Page Rank search is far superior to the Yahoo PFI.
The best marketing is word of mouth. And the word of mouth on the street is that Yahoo has taken a large shotgun to the feet that it walks on.
My understanding is that the web results will still be mostly free.
should take the opportunity to use what influence they have to educate their customers
And if you are wrong you've lost a lot of that credibility..
However, free traffic is not a poor business model at all. A lot of great content exists because it is funded by programs such as AdSense and Affiliate programs.
Yahoo has basically said that websites can no longer exist on great content alone, they must have a product to sell or they should just shutdown now.
I know a lot of people who publish great content and Google will send traffic their way for the keywords that they have content for. If Google went PFI as well, all of these websites to a man would have to shut down.
Yahoo is basically using its monopolistic position to shutdown half of the internet. I can only assume that this anti-internet behaviour will be punished dearly and I believe we should facilitate this by using word of mouth techniques to let people know how irrelevant, inadequate, and incomplete Yahoo's Shopping and General Information search results now are.
Many large businesses long ago discovered that you have to cooperate with the small businesses sometimes. Yahoo has forgotten that maxim and we can only hope that history will come down on the side of the small business and not the corporation.
You do NOT turn up the heat right away, because the frog will just jump out.
Instead, bit by bit, you warm up the water until the frog doesn't realize that its completely cooked.
Businesses which have a model based on free, search engine optomized traffic, should take the opportunity to use what influence they have to educate their customers and the public at large that because of Yahoo's new 'paid' algorithm, their results will be incomplete and inadequate for both Shopping and general information.
That comes down to point of view though.
If I were a webmaster of an online sales site (which I am not) I would take that as an opportunity to market my product.
As nanocet stated, putting your business on sole reliance of a free source of traffic is not necessarily the best model.
It is obviously your model, so your point of view is understandable, but it's not everyone's point of view.
TJ
Since when did they say that you have to pay or else you can forget about getting your site listed for free? I've seen a ton of new content listed for free these past few weeks. Are they going to stop what they have just begun for the new Site Match system? I don't think so.
Also, from an advertiser point of view, this does put the power in the hands of the few instead of the many.
Instead of getting traffic from many sources (for example, content websites) the traffic is going to come from fewer and fewer gatekeepers.
The small content websites are going to disappear and power is going to be consolidated amongst large websites like Yahoo. As a seller, you do NOT want this.. They will simply be able to increase their prices and you will have little leverage against them.
Trust me, this is bad news all around.
If no one complains at this point and things go on as normal (traffic to Yahoo SERP doesn't drop), do you really think they're not going to just push more and more PFI on people?
They will do it incrementally until one day you realise it's all PFI.
Yahoo is a content website (which Google isn't, btw!). Yahoo hates all those little content websites, they want them to disappear. They also hate that Google has locked them up as Partners with AdSense.
This is just a step in that direction. They will start with simple PFI and it will get incrementally worse and worse. This is a dangerous turn of events for everyone.
[edited by: logiclamp at 2:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 2, 2004]
If you are an adsense publisher you should have valuable content that the engines will want users to see. I just wouldn't expect competitive industries to have free listings on the first couple of pages.
>>Yahoo hates all those little content websites
You have no proof of that. They are a business trying to make money.
[edited by: korkus2000 at 2:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 2, 2004]
Yeah but those are the interesting industries to publish content for.
As for proof .. Why would yahoo like to send free traffic to websites that are subsidizing AdWords revenue for Google? I do not need proof just basic logic ability.
I just wish next week they'd launch another program: site review to be re-included in the index. Plenty of sites baned or penalized and no one knows why for sure. Sent an e-mail but who knows. Inktomi really sucked at this.
all that said, I'm boycotting Site Match because I can't afford it.
Those are the 5% that a lot of content people make a lot of money off of.
Good bye, content!
Less competition for me :)
Oh, and no doubt you will be banning Slurp from indexing you for free. Or is that going a little too far?
Site Match is a killer...for small business and hobby sites that is. 15 cents or 30 cents per 'click'? I think that's just way too greedy.
Site Match would be good for high demand consumer goods/services sites....basically a heaven for heavy ecommerce sites...a pure shopping search engine.
The free crawl is a kind of necessary nuance for Y Search otherwise their database would be pure garbage to users perspective.
Though they stated that relevancy is based on page content but who really knows their algo or could even guarantee that the algo would be fair to 'everybody'.
It's not that hard to inject a filter, perhaps boosting the relevancy score of a paying URL. After all, they make money for each clickthrough. Very tempting, right?
So in essense the free crawl...is just there to fill in the gap for searches that have no paying URL which is critical for search engine operation. That is if they want to retain users.
Should I ban slurp and its cousins? Of course not, that's nonsense. But I'll keep an eye on its usage and the ratio of users it brings back to me.
Bottomline is...we want a search engine that could compete with Google on 'all levels' not just on the advertising side of business.
Lets stop arguing about the obvious and start arguing what we're going to do about.
I suggest stop using Yahoo for search and to educate everyone we know that Yahoo's search results are inadequate, incomplete, and are rapidly becoming irrelevant for both shopping and general information.
