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A quick look at Yahoo!
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Non-profit sites may be listed for free. For commercial sites, Yahoo! has shifted to a pay-for-review service. A bit of clarification is needed, here. When you visit Yahoo, do you enter a search term? Or do you muscle your way through their directory? The directory is indeed a Yahoo directory. However, their search function has always been powered by their #1 competitor, Google. So, every Yahoo search was in reality a Google search. To fix that, in 2003 Yahoo bought Inktomi, and has been putting its search technology to work on/for the Yahoo site. Yahoo and Google formally tore the blanket in February, 2004. Here, as of March, 2004, is a bit more of the necessary lay of the land. Yahoo now owns Overture pay-per-click service. Overture, in turn, owns AlltheWeb and Alta Vista engines. That's three different search operations. Over a hundred years ago at the Little Big Horn, General Custer painfully learned not to split his forces. For business reasons, managing just one search engine is better, too. So, Yahoo is converting all of its searches to Inktomi technology. (Apparently, AlltheWeb and Alta Vista will either follow suit or eventually may be shut down.) As of this writing, Yahoo's search engine and the directory are two separate entities. First, the directory. Yahoo's directory guidelines specify that Yahoo! is organized by subject. Their primary concern about your submission is that you properly select where you think you should be listed. Yahoo!'s editors will then evaluate your request. Meta Tags are not important, here, because they will actually visit your Web site to determine its value, how it should be listed -- if they decide to list it -- and decide what description to use. Because of this human presence, it is extremely important that your site contain:
The Yahoo directory is a pay-for-submission situation. If yours is a commercial site, then Yahoo charges a USD $299 non-refundable, recurring annual fee just for the review... whether or not they include it in the directory. In the search engine function, it appears that Meta tags will be important, especially the keywords tag -- as long as it is highly relative to the page itself. Also, augmenting their pay-for-review approach is pay-for-inclusion. In March, 2004, Yahoo announced implementation of the new (Overture's) Site Match (tm) program. |
To open an account you would pay...
Based on your type of company, you become one of two tiers of patrons, and pay either $0.15 or $0.30 per click-through.
Example: You have a simple real estate site and have only your Home page in the search engine. You deposit maybe $50 (not included in the above $49.) At $0.30 per click-through, your site is then covered for about 166 Website visitors. Let's assume yours is a very small site, with only a dozen visitors per day. $50 gives two weeks' coverage. That means $50x26 = $1,300 + $49 = $1,349 cost per year. (Of course, if you are in other venues as well, you would multiply this figure by Yahoo's share of your overall Marketing mix.) You must keep a positive balance in the account to remain in the program. At this writing we do not know what additional re-sign-up fees may be incurred if you allow your balance to fall to zero, and/or if your listing's presence would be affected. When evaluating such a program, you need to run some numbers. If you get one sales inquiry for every 10 Website visitors, then at $0.30 your cost comes to $3 per inquiry. If you get one sale out of every 10 inquiries, then that comes to $30 cost per sale. That's not bad if you are selling ponies, but it's an entirely different matter if you are selling pony rides. In resources such as Web Pro World, Yahoo is attempting clarifications:
"Free crawl" means that provided links to your site already exist on other Web sites, then you may get listed anyway, at no charge. |
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