Flat Rate Paid Inclusion: Yahoo! Search Submit Basic Returns

Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.

While Search Submit Pro allows you to have more control over listings and is sold on a costs a per click basis, their Search Submit Basic allows you to submit URLs for $49 per year per URL.

In the past Search Submit Basic was called Search Submit Express. It charged a flat inclusion price and sold clicks on CPC basis. Here is an Archive.org link to the old program.

If you have launched a new site and are not getting much Yahoo! traffic, submitting a few of your highest value pages is a good call. If you have key deep high value pages that are not staying indexed in Yahoo! this program also makes sense.

Published: April 14, 2007 by Aaron Wall in yahoo marketing seo tips

Comments

April 14, 2007 - 12:20pm

Yahoo! is quite crappy at crawling relative to Google. In some cases it might just make sense to use their search builder or search submit basic to try to get a more comprehensive crawl.

Mark Laymon
April 14, 2007 - 8:31pm

Is yahoo still dropping your entire site once the paid inclusion is not renewed?

Fervor Singles
April 15, 2007 - 2:24pm

Ok I am confused. I thought that Yahoo was like google and if you had inboud links that Yahoo would spoder your site just like any search engine. Is this no longer the case?

April 15, 2007 - 8:05pm

Yahoo! does crawl sites. But their algorithms to do so are not as elegant as Google's algorithms are.

John
May 4, 2007 - 4:02pm

All
My website, http://www.hubcaphaven.com/, does great for the front page in Yahoo but I can get yahoo do index any of my other 800 pages. Any idea why?

ineedhits.com
April 16, 2007 - 6:10am

Great write-up Aaron. At ineedhits, were very excited about this new program and happy to be announced as one of only 2 resellers of Search Submit Basic. As you said the removal of all click fees would be the most notable change to the program, which is a move towards other paid inclusion programs that were extremely popular a few years ago. I agree that at only $49 it’s a great way to ensure your URLs are included in the Yahoo! index for a full 12 months!

Joseph
April 16, 2007 - 12:29pm

I am going to report this to Google as paidlink as Mat Cuts has pointed in his latest blog entry

mblair
April 16, 2007 - 12:52pm

Joseph - it gets worse than that. All Yahoo directory listings use naked links and they charge $300/yr for commercial sites... Now that Matt Cutts is asking people to rat out those sporting paid links that aren't coded nofollow I a imagine he is going to be inundated with reports about Yahoo..

julian
April 16, 2007 - 2:13pm

If you pay to be included in the yahoo directory, do you also need to pay to be spidered as well?

Or the fact that you are in the yahoo directory mean that you automatically get spidered?

Fervor Singles
April 16, 2007 - 8:53pm

Aaron,

I have a blog that has over 300 other blogs feeding off my RSS and posting my posts on their site.

Will this cause google to delist me for having duplicate content?

Also, when companies do press releases, and those press releases get distributed online (same thing posted many times), do these sites get dulplicate content penalties?

Can you talk about duplicate content please!

Thank you

Fervor Singles
April 16, 2007 - 9:03pm

On Yahoo Directory

I recently was accepted into Yahoo's directory, and so far I have been pretty dissapointed with it.

I have not received a single visitor from the site.

I have blogs that have never been spidered by Google -PR0 that are sending me more traffic than yahoo. I just hope that Yahoo transfers page rank to my site. But so far it has not been worth the money.

April 16, 2007 - 11:00pm

I would look at the Yahoo! Directory as a quality link (not a traffic source). I would consider Yahoo!'s Search Submit Basic program if my site were new or had crawling problems.

Chris Nielsen
June 7, 2007 - 3:27am

Some of the posters sound like they need to talk to a SEO consultant, and I'm not just saying that because I am one...

Unless I'm wrong, this issue is about Yahoo's paid inclusion in their search results, not the directory inclusion. Here are my thoughts on each:

While my main site was listed in Yahoo directory waaay back when it was free, I don't know that I ever got a lot of traffic from it, but it's very nice to have for traffic and the link. For years I advised against anyone paying the $300 for inclusion as being too expensive. Then my partner and I decided to pay for a couple of sites to be included and while I don't know if it was really worth it (we don't sell anything on the sites) we did notice a jump in traffic from the directory.

The paid inclusion program still lives today I think, because most people don't seem to understand what it really is. You pay to be included, not placed. The placement/rankings are still based on how well your site is optimized. They just review/spider it more quickly and more often. Dark rumors whisper that you DO gain some advantage over non-paid listings, but we may never know if that's true or not.

What I never liked about it, is that I did not consider being included or spidered more often worth the money. AND, the old program also charged you when your listings were clicked on as well...! To me, there were to many disadvantages over any small advantages.

Frigging Slurp is always eating up my sites second only to the Googlebot, so what's the point?

Michael sherman
April 18, 2007 - 2:23am

I own a website that gets all of its traffic from Google, Its about 3 years old. I am indexed in yahoo but the For some reason im in top 10's all over google , but nothing on yahoo. Do you think this program would help with ranking?

kris
April 20, 2007 - 1:42pm

Same here.

Not a single yahoo search result.

Anyone can clear the doubt....is it

KOL
July 3, 2007 - 5:30pm

I love how people think that yahoo isn't going to give ppc listings preferential treatment in the serps...think about it...how else would yahoo make any money if the listing was truly 'subject to the same algorithm as unpaid listings' and therefore not on the 1st page.

I should know, we do in fact participate in yahoo paid inclusion with several thousand URLs. Guess what? This program has the worst ROI of any of our web marketing activities. BY FAR. The conversion rate of visitors coming in through these urls is absolutely awful. Makes you woner...

Tonton Baroud
April 14, 2007 - 11:18am

Aaron, a 49$ non refundable fee for a weekly crawl... I'm agree with you only : for new websites ! Anyway, the reporting chart looks interresting. But they are not particulary clear about their buddle page audit prestation...

David Curtis
August 19, 2008 - 5:39pm

Clearing the doubt - To my understanding merely signing up with the directory is not enough. Time is what matters. When you sign up and they get you in, your Yahoo Directory is used as feed by hundreds of second tier directories, each with a link back to your own site. Yes, the directory is crawled by Google. The number of back links from the other directories on the internet create categorized back links to your site. Each category in each smaller directory means that the links are coming from pages related to the type of business that you're involved with. The general theory is that this will elevate your ranking in general. If you do a back-link check on any good site you'll see hundreds if not thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of back links pointing to that site. This is the main value of directories - BUT there are businesses that use these directories to make purchases, and they rely upon these directories almost exclusively. What you might want to do for the next submission is to focus on your copy writing. If what little space you have to describe the benefits of your goods or services to the client is not compelling enough for them to click on - then you can work on optimizing that by working on copy writing techniques.

Add new comment

(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.