Yahoo has compromised the integrity of their organic (natural) search results. Recently Yahoo has added a search submit feature that allows any company to purchase their way into the organic results. You can know longer expect that the results you see are the most relative based on the contents in the pages.

Although this is not brand new, it is not common knowledge to most Yahoo users who expect the natural results to be based on the pages content and relevance to what they are searching for. Providing a natural section of search results is what makes a search engine a viable portal to the internet and not just a “Spam” site. You expect to get unbiased information in your natural search results and have the advertising clearly marked and when you remove the distinction between the two, users can no longer trust what they are going to be clicking.

Essentially, Yahoo is not only discrediting their brand as a serious search engine, they are in danger of losing loyalty from the millions of people that currently use Yahoo and have for years in an attempt to increase their advertising revenue.

Yahoo claims that the pages submitted for their “Search Submit Express” are displayed based on the relevance to search terms. But how can the pages be displayed by relevance when the relevant pages that aren’t paying are pushed out of the way to make room for the paid pages? And to further discredit the idea of relevance, this statement is on the programs “How it Works” area. “You must maintain a positive balance in your account for your pages to remain active in the program.” If the pages are relevant, they should be displayed regardless of whether you are paying or not. This completely contradicts the whole idea of relevance and introduces an oxymoronic statement I call “Paid Relevance” in organic results.

More and more SEO professionals are seeing that pages in their websites are not being cached or indexed by Yahoo (regardless of meeting the content quality guidelines) thus forcing more and more companies to consider this option. As more companies engage in this Yahoo program, the more compromised the organic results in Yahoo will be. As you can see, this is a real issue that affects millions of people and how they search.

Why is Yahoo engaging in an activity that so clearly violates what makes a great search engine great? Perhaps it’s because of the market share they continuously lose to their major competitor Google. Perhaps this is an attempt to squeeze the turnip dry. Perhaps this is just a misguided decision that some executives thought wouldn’t be that big of a deal that could increase their ad revenue? I don’t know the reason why Yahoo has put such a program in place but one thing is for sure, Google understands the importance of keeping it’s organic search results and has vowed from day 1 to keep it’s natural results organic.

So you can see in more detail what I am talking about, here is the link directly to the Yahoo program. Enjoy!  http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse.php
Thanks,
Brad Henry

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Brad Henry's Post, Uncategorized, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.