Yahoo quietly move to yield-based system

Yahoo change their system and affect the order of results.

[klickz]

While the thread at [webmasterworld.com...] is a very useful discussion, it is mainly featuring the gripes of advertisers and the traffic that comes from Yahoo search partners. While I fully accept that there are most probably some junk partners, there are also legitimate partners that try hard to create quality sites that refer targeted traffic to advertisers. It is well known that some of these partners run arbitrage operations by buying traffic from Google and other sources. Until a few days ago, the Yahoo system was based purely on price - pay more than the next guy and appear higher up the list. That applied as much on the Yahoo partner site as it did on the Yahoo site itself. What seems to have happened within the last week is that Yahoo have introduced some form of yield-based system where bidding higher than your competitor does not necessarily mean you are in a higher position.

This has a big implication for Yahoo search partners as they will no longer be able to make assumptions about the share of the click they will get back. At least, as someone who is operating in this space can figure out, it's going to be much harder.. or perhaps even impossible. The point of posting is actually to ask if others have noticed this change which really doesn't seem to have been widely documented. As pointe dout elsewhere Yahoo make serious income from their partner network. I doubt they would create a system that makes keyword arbitrage impossible for their search partners. Can anyone shed more light on this and perhaps discuss the implications for search partners as well as for advertisers?

If you want to see these changes for yourself the Overture/Yahoo bid tool shows it quite clearly. results that used to display in bid price order now don't!. Try it at here [uv.bidtool.overture.com].

[edited by: rogerd at 2:22 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2006]
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[Tropical Island]

I have just done a check on some of the more popular terms in my UK account and indeed there seems to be something going on.

In my niche there only seems to be one large (well known) travel site that is being affected. I thought at first that it might be a glitch in the keyword tool however when you go to [searchmarketing.yahoo.com...] and enter the keyword into the Yahoo PPC search engine it shows the same order of sites. This large site is bidding 17 pence and is on the bottom of the list while everybody else is between 10 & 12 pence.

Don't really understand what is going on.

[inbound]

I can see the changes too, but they seems to be very crude.

Along the lines of:

84p
83p
...
11p
10p
Then 33p
32p
17p
14p

It's as if there are 2 sets of results, if you are in the lower set it does not matter how much you bid, you will end up below 'good' 10p bids!

[Tropical Island]

Just had a thought.

Could this just be another Yahoo / Over screwup? :-)

[briggidere]

i am seeing this on one of my keywords that i bid on. it's not me affected but it is strange.

and funny enough, all the lines at yahoo platinum team are busy. i guess they are getting a few calls about this today.

i would expect a bug more then anything else really.

[simon_c]

Isn't this just standard match listings appearing above advanced match listings?

[searchmarketing.yahoo.com...]

[shorebreak]

I would tend to agree with Simon; what you've seen so far is 100% explainable by Yahoo's current ranking system, which gives priority to exact matched keywords over 'advanced match'.

-Shorebreak

[sem4u]

I would agree with Simon. Advanced match listings are showing below standard match listings.