Hi,

I have a question on Paid Inclusion and Natural traffic.

My client has a huge database of pages. They are interested in running a Paid Inclusion campaign, but are concerned about Inktomi excluding pages that rank well naturally in favour of their paid inclusion pages. For example, if a users query matches a naturally indexed page and a paid inclusion page, inktomi will drop the naturally indexed page and display the the paid inclusion page in the SERPS. My client is concerned about paying for traffic that he would normally get for free.

Can someone please shed some light on this?

All comments are hugely appreciated.

Regards.

Hey Now,

Yes your client may end up paying for clicks that he would have normally received for free from his natural positions. However, a couple points to consider.

Yahoo slurp is slow and chances are, a huge database of product URL’s is only fractionally included. So, there is a big benefit to ensuring full exposure, even if it means you end up paying for some traffic that you might have received for free. Even more so - your client adds products often or deletes products.

Those pages that are organically included probably don’t have very good titles or descriptions. You can explain that by feeding hand-crafted titles and descriptions the inbound traffic that he does receive will likely be of higher quality than his organic results and most likely will be more pre-qualified as potential purchasers. For example, it’s unlikely that his organic results have clean / concise titles and clearly denote prices within the description. You can both gain more clicks by having quality feed Titles and Descriptions & reduce junk clicks from end users who are unlikely to purchase.

There is a cost associated with not having full exposure within Yahoo. There are also costs involved with not having good organic titles and descriptions b/c even with high organic positions people skip over poorly articulated or confusing listings. There are also costs involved with converting free organic traffic into paid traffic. If he had to pay for 1/3 of his current Yahoo referred traffic, but also gained 50% to 75% additional quality traffic, would the inclusion be worth the cost of paying for some of the traffic he used to receive for free? For some the answer is no, but for most of the folks who try it – I find the results far outweigh not having the 100% inclusion.

Hope it helps...

thanks for the comments!. So is it true that yahoo will throw out the natural page in favour of the paid inclusion page because they make money from it?

thanks again.

no.

You may end up with both organic and paid listings but afaik none of the ppc schemes remove your page from organic listings if it happens to also be in the paid.

BA, for example, often advertise on their own name and also show in the organics, and I don't think there's any change for less well known companies/keywords.

As the SE's aim to provide high quality user experience, and to provide searchers with high quality results, is it not counter productive to display two results of the same URL in the SERPs?

ppc ads aren't in the SERPs though :)

Think of the organic results and the PPC ads as totally seperate things - effectively the PPC ads on Google are only like adsense on any other site - they appear automatically in response to certain keywords but what appears on the organic side is not effected at all by the PPC side.

ppc ads aren't in the SERPs though :)

Think of the organic results and the PPC ads as totally seperate things - effectively the PPC ads on Google are only like adsense on any other site - they appear automatically in response to certain keywords but what appears on the organic side is not effected at all by the PPC side.

Gurtie - The original post said "Paid Inclusion." I suspect the poster was referring to Yahoo's Search Submit Express, which, as I remember, can be the worst of all possible worlds, because it attaches a pay per click fee to a naturally ranking page.

They are interested in running a Paid Inclusion campaign, but are concerned about Inktomi excluding pages that rank well naturally in favour of their paid inclusion pages.

haimnahraf - What Search Submit Express does is get you into the index faster... It doesn't exactly help your rankings.

Submitted URLs are presented in algorithmic search results based on relevance to search terms.

I say "doesn't exactly" for two reasons. In the original incarnation of the program, there was some hedging about whether the process of getting your site "in compliance with content quality guidelines" in fact carried with it a bit of free SEO coaching.

The current Search Submit material (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse_hiw.php) makes it clear that there isn't any coaching, at least not by Yahoo, and that the guidance won't be free....

The Search Submit program does not include web site consulting services. If you are unsure whether your site complies with the Content Quality Guidelines or if you would like further guidance on how to improve the pages you want to submit to Search Submit, we urge you to work with one of the following authorized Search Submit resellers....

The other possible improvement in rankings the service might provide is the ability to tune your pages and have them re-crawled in a 48 hr period. In the newly evolving Yahoo algo, I can't see how this is going to be as much help as it was when Yahoo's onpage factors were stronger.

So, if you're using Search Submit because you think it will improve your rankings, it won't. Pages that won't rank without it won't rank with it. The only good reason I can think of for using the program is for seasonal pages, or pages that change often, where you'd want to get very quick inclusion for new content. Again, with Yahoo's increased reliance on off-page factors, I don't know how helpful this will be.

As to whether the paid url "replaces" the natural page in the index, I think it does. I don't know how quickly or slowly it would take for the natural page to be re-indexed after you dropped Search Submit. Theoretically, it should re-appear in the same place when it does.