Yahoo To End Paid Inclusion Program

10|19|2009 3:06 am EDT

by Adam Strong in Categories: Search Engines - 3 Comments

In an announcement making some waves in the SEO world last week, Yahoo announced that they would be ending their paid inclusion program. SearchEngineLand.com points out access to Yahoo’s paid inclusion sales page has been redirected to their advertising.yahoo.com.

“Both the “Search Submit Basic” program that charged an annual fee per URL and the “Search Submit Pro” cost-per-click program will end as of Dec. 31, 2009.”

Yahoo’s paid inclusion has faced some criticism from those who believe including paid ads in an organic search makes the results biased. At the press conference announcing the Yahoo/Microsoft deal in July the company said “we’ll decide on that later”. Well it looks like they decided.

This may turn out to be a good thing for PPC on Yahoo. With paid inclusion gone advertisers will be looking for that same traffic and those ad dollars could shift to PPC. Any kind of uptick in PPC would be a benefit to domain owners parking with Yahoo. We’ll see.

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3 Comments

Brian Benko

October 19, 2009 @ 11:49 am EDT

I am sure yahoo has their reasons but this is a strange position from my perspective. This is pure margin for them. People login and drop $299 to have their site listed. No maintenance. No software….

SEO and PPC are two separate games in my opinion. There are a lot of SEO players that never buy PPC ads so this $299 per year will simply get redistributed to other sites that sell links.

Who needs a directory anyway… :)

Sumit Bahl

October 19, 2009 @ 8:02 pm EDT

Brian, this is nothing to do with the Yahoo Directory. This is about the Search Submit Pro and Search Submit Basic program that Yahoo ad, which was basically “Paying to rank in Organic Results”.

Camille Canon

October 20, 2009 @ 11:03 am EDT

Thanks for the great summary, Adam. I do agree that this could be a very big game changer for targeting PPC ads on Yahoo… or Bing.

You should also check out Matt Kain’s blog post, which details the less understood aspects of paid inclusion and why it will be missed. http://www.thesearchagents.com/2009/10/a-eulogy-for-yahoo-ssp-one-of-the-better-and-least-understood-innovations-in-search/

Thanks again!

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