Ok, so I wake up this morning after, like, next to no sleep, and I have a chat window from an agency friend of mine who’s been talking with SEM folks a lot lately.
Guess what Yahoo pitched him?
“For .20 per click you can provide the ad copy..as opposed to crawler results fed copy.”
In other words, Yahoo is trying to charge advertisers (poor, poor babies) who don’t know that they should be able to put description copy in the metadata for free. Charging per click. For organic search.
…
Ok, now that I’m done ROFLMAO, that’s frikkin criminal.
Let’s get into concrete examples for you non-tech types. Here’s what the screen looks like when I search Yahoo for “apple pie”:
The third natural-search result has a link, and the copy under the link reads: “Quick and easy, with a great non-crust topping. Try a variety of apples…” etc.
That’s because, when the website was coded, a smart, geeky dude, possibly an SEO dude, used a bit of HTML code called a metatag to tell search engine bots that the page description was “Quick and easy…” etc. He also used metatags to tell bots what the page title is, what its keywords are, and maybe even who the site author was. It was really easy, but it made the site appearance in search results look awesome and helped the SERP a bit, perhaps.
Now, the Google bots feed the metadata description of a page straight onto the search results page. Yahoo sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. Honestly, their results descriptions are a botched-up, indecipherable mess with lots of ellipses and fragments.
So, for the marketers whose meta descriptions get mangled by Yahoo… Sorry. Good SEO isn’t enough for Yahoo. You’re gonna have to pay-per-click for the privilege of Yahoo getting your metadata right.
Let’s review: Google = Free description from your good SEO. Yahoo = Paid description because their engine messes up your SEO.
Then again, considering the share Yahoo has of the organic search market, I guess it’s not going to steal serious revenue from advertisers anyway.
Still, on this day, Yahoo gets to wear the Evil Hat.
2 Comments
May 21, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Hi Jolie,
This sounds like Yahoo’s paid inclusion program, which has been around for 5-7 years ( I think?).
I think I’ve used it 1-2 times in my lifetime, for huge websites that were having difficulty getting properly crawled by Yahoo.
Yes, cynically you can say “Yahoo = Paid description because their engine messes up your SEO.”, but you can also say “instantly ensure that your webpages will be included in the index and dictate your description so you can study and boost CTR rates for your organic listings”.
Yes, I know ultimate it’s the same thing.
May 21, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Yah, their paid inclusion is pretty Evil Hat, too.
I honestly don’t know who actually uses Yahoo for search anymore. Maybe those users deserve a rotten search experience.
Still, the principle of the thing, that organic search is free and based on the merit of your site’s content, is being pooped on by Yahoo’s insufficiently advanced technology.
It is not magic.
It is the suck.