Pay Yahoo to get into organic results?

I’ve never been a fan of Yahoo. I’ve tried using their search engine many times but their results suck. They are great if you’re looking for old websites that have little or nothing to do with your topic, but none the less there has been nothing that has excited me.

I’ve tried their Yahoo 360 pages and their email. While trying to promote Life Uncut, I ran into a service from Yahoo I have overlooked, which is Yahoo Search Submit. I usually don’t submit my sites to search engines (I point links to them in order to get indexed) and kicked myself in the head for overlooking this (hey man the Internet is huge) but hey you live and you learn right?

There appears to be two services for Yahoo search submit.

Search submit basic
Search submit Pro

“Search Submit Basic enables you to submit up to 5 URLs per domain for inclusion in non-sponsored search results on Yahoo!, and other portals such as AltaVista and AllTheWeb.”

Enjoy fast inclusion and weekly refreshes.

Your web pages will typically appear in search results within 4 days of submission. After that, it’s easy to keep your content up-to-date with our 7-day refresh cycle.

Easily track your performance.

Get essential performance reports that provide insights such as how many clicks your URLs have received and what their average ranks are in Yahoo! search results.

Find out how to improve your web site.

Take advantage of our tool that analyzes the meta-tags of your submitted URLs and suggests best practices for optimizing your pages.”

Not bad for 45 bucks, but if you know anything about blogs they get indexed quick all you need is one friend to add you to his blog roll and wallah you’re in Yahoo and it only took me 4 days.

Why would I want Yahoo to look at my Meta Tags when I can read up on it from my favorite SEO.

Who cares about Altavista and Alltheweb? Does anyone even know they exist anymore? If you’re new to the game of SEO, 45 bucks is a steal. There are allot of companies out there that promise results and won’t hesitate to charge you thousands of bucks to rank your website, but if the search engine (if Yahoo is the search engine you target) offers advise for 45 bucks a year will not break the bank.

Now let me discuss the Pro version of Yahoo search submit. I’m going to include the main points of pro or you can read the full profile here.

Get more control over your search marketing messages

Be sure your content gets included

Keep your content and marketing messages fresh

Get in-depth marketing insight

Get hands-on assistance

“Search Submit Pro is typically for customers with search marketing budgets of $5,000 per month or more, or advertisers who submit more than 1,000 Web pages to the program.”

For a big business this seems like a pretty good deal. One thing though, they charge by the click. But it’s not pay per click (no keyword bidding required) the pages you submit are based upon relevancy. OK. How do you measure that when you stated

Be sure your content gets included

“Search Submit Pro lets you include Web pages that might otherwise be excluded from algorithmic search results*. Examples include sites that require cookies or session IDs, sites with Flash content and information stored in content management systems, or sites that aren’t well crawled because of Web site design. Search Submit Pro removes the guesswork and lets you decide which content should be included.”

For large business‘s this might be a good business model. The thing is all of this can be accomplished with a little bit of reading blogs that mention SEO. Or you can buy a ebook on howto rank a website in search engines from industry experts. In either case Yahoo is having you pay to be on their search engine. I as a web user like when an advertisement is clearly displayed and not hidden. I tend to trust sites less that try to hide their adds. I use the Internet for information and have no problem with people making money off it, we all have to eat right? But when a search engine that makes money off of other people work in the first place asks you to pay them for ranking off your work in their search engine leaves me a little uneasy. Why not offer the advice for free live Google has done with their webmaster console and the attempt Live.com did to create similar webmaster tools

For those who want to target Yahoo’s audience and have no clue about SEO the basic version seems reasonable to me, but since I’m not a fan of Yahoo I can’t see the justice in buying something I don’t need.

Tags

Yahoo