The Detail On Yahoo!'s New Paid Inclusion Service

The search engine marketplace has undergone significant changes over the past 18-months but yesterday's news from Yahoo! marks a turning point in the industry. How these new expenses will impact the search engine marketplace in the long-run remains to be seen but the impact on websites with lower advertising budgets will be enormous.
Yahoo's distribution reach is massive. Since it began displaying results from its own search engine in place of Google results, Yahoo controls over 41% of search engine traffic either directly or through one of its six distinct search properties, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Directory, Overture, AlltheWeb, Inktomi and AltaVista.
Site XChange
For larger, corporate websites, the new fee structure is not as daunting or intimidating, and may provide benefits for the advertisers. Site XChange will accept all pages in a site from an XML feed detailing information about that site. Overture staff will manage these accounts and provide feedback to webmasters in order to help them improve the information they provide to help improve rankings under targeted keywords and phrases. Fees will be charged on a pay-per-click basis. Ask your webmaster or search engine optimization for advise on establishing an XML feed.
The Bottom Lines
The last time the search engine marketing world saw a fee-schedule like this one was in November 2002 when LookSmart introduced a cost-per-click charge on top of previously paid submission fees. Webmasters immediately rebelled against LookSmart and look what's happened since. That is where the comparison ends however as Yahoo is the second largest search tool in the world and placement at Yahoo is just about as essential as placement at Google. A webmaster rebellion is not likely to last very long or be successful. We expect the team at Yahoo to make some changes to the fee structure of Site Match as it is obviously unfair to smaller players and will likely improve Overture's revenues at the cost of Yahoo's.
Adding a cost-per-click charge on top of a fee for inclusion might also drive smaller businesses over to Google which continues to provide the only 100% free listings available from the major search engines. This change also abruptly ends the honeymoon the "new" Yahoo has enjoyed with search engine marketers. SEOs and webmasters seemed unanimous in their praise for Yahoo's recent Google-free listings. With a massive increase in fees, many small businesses will no longer be able to afford to list in Yahoo. Several of our clients view SEO services marketing as an equalizer against their larger corporate competition. This assumes all things are equal on the Internet, which is obviously untrue as all advertising budgets are not created equally.
With Google being the only major player not charging fees for inclusion, it is assumed that it is only a matter of time before they are forced into jumping on the fee-for-service bandwagon. Luckily, Google co-founder Larry Page criticized Yahoo's new policy yesterday saying he felt paid-inclusion has the ability to compromise the credibility of search.
For now, it appears the future is about to get a lot more expensive. Thank goodness it is at least interesting.