I had an interesting call today with a prospect who was considering Yahoo Paid Inclusion. I have become a bit of a black sheep in the SEO community for not embracing this business model, so I thought the blog might be a perfect place to weigh in on this issue in the public domain.

The prospect we spoke to today is a major magazine publisher. I guarantee that if you are in business, you have read their magazine at least once. One of our sales people went in their office, and I joined via telephone. After going through the proposal they recognized that unlike all the other SEO firms they have spoken to, we left out any mention of Paid Inclusion into Yahoo. The prospect of course found this odd. My explanation is simple.

I was able to go to Google and see that the prospect’s site has over 300,000 pages indexed into the search engine. I then went to Yahoo and found that they had over 300,000 pages indexed there as well. This means that they are just as well indexed into Yahoo as Google. Remember, Paid Inclusion is all about paying to be included. It’s not paid placement where you pay for preferential placement in the search results.

We then went through their search traffic history. This prospect received over 800,000 visitors from Yahoo Search in the past 30 days. Remember, when you move to paid inclusion, Yahoo wants you to list all your URL’s. This prospect is under the impression they will be able to get pricing in the .03 per click from Paid Inclusion. This means that they would pay over $24,000 for just their current search traffic!

I have rarely seen Paid Inclusion increase a currently indexed site more than 5%, but for the sake of a good argument, let’s say that Paid Inclusion increases their search visibility and clicks by 10%. Now let’s say that they increase to 880,000 search visitors a month from Yahoo. This would put their bill at $26,400 for an increase of 80,000 search visitors, making the price of this program closer to .33 per click than .03.

Why Would SEO Firms Promote Paid Inclusion?

It is our job, as a Search Engine Optimization firm, to make a client’s site more “search friendly.” We do this by optimizing the code and content on a page to make it more in line with what search engines can compute. This is hard, time consuming, and skilled work. Many search marketing firms simply work with a preferred Paid Inclusion partner like Quigo to provide a streamlined process for Paid Inclusion. By streamlined, I mean streamlined for the search marketing company, not for you as the client. Quigo and a few other companies have built technology that can spider your site, create the feed, and submit to Yahoo. Yahoo then reviews the feed and returns a list of suggested changes to the Website, which obviously the client must do, and then re-submits. In this situation, the search marketing company doesn’t do much of anything.

Now consider if the search marketing firm were to land a client like the prospect I spoke to today. They would have a client who is ready to spend $24,000 a month on search traffic from Yahoo, and the only effort the search marketing firm would have to expend would be passing the contract onto Quigo. The payout for the search marketing company is 15%, and 5% to Quigo, depending on how well they worked their deal with Yahoo and Quigo. That would mean the search marketing company makes $3,600 per month without increasing traffic by as much as one click! Hmmm…maybe USWeb is crazy for not jumping on this. However, what happens when a smart client tracks the clicks and sees they’ve paid over $43k for a year and not seen one extra search visitor? Well…I guess we will see over the next couple of years how many “smart clients” are out there.

So, Is Paid Inclusion a Scam?

Despite how much I may seem opposed to model, I do see value for some companies. Yahoo has offered a significant advantage for a site that launches a dynamic site with 100,000’s of URL’s and no current visibility in Yahoo. Moreover, if they could work out a .03 per click rate, they would most likely have a tremendous ROI.

If you think your site would benefit from Paid Inclusion, check a couple of things. First, see how many pages you currently have in Yahoo compared to how many pages you would put in. Second, figure out how much traffic you currently receive and from where. Third, give USWeb a call and let us take a look at your site and give you a straight answer if this makes sense.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.