Re: Yahoo (Price) Surprise!

From: Alex Tillman <alex_at_webtillman.com>
Date: Wed 23 Jan 2002 11:57:53 -0500

Just to offer my two cents on the yahoo deal:

While it's true that Yahoo has offered the Express
service for a while now, the change is that you now
have to pay to stay in the directory (although there
is supposed to be a grandfather clause for those who
paid for Express before the announcement). This is
really a huge change, since it turns Yahoo into a
modified "pay for a listing" service, instead of a
genuine directory.

So the question is "is it worth the $299 a year" to be
listed in Yahoo? To help you answer this question I
would recommend using the search sugestion tool at
Overture
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
In my opinion, this is one of the best free tools out
there, because it shows you the terms that people
actually use (mispellings and all) and sometimes the
results are truly surprising. Now, it's based on
traffic for Overture (not Yahoo) so you can only
extrapolate the actual traffic figures you might get
on Yahoo, but it will show you relative rankings for
terms. Using that you can then check and see how
crowded the arena is for terms you want. I'd say if
you can find a term that relates to your site and gets
decent traffic, yet it is also underepresented in
Yahoo, the $299 might be well worth it. If all the
popular terms are super crowded, however and you'll be
on page 1 billion of the listings, it's probably not
going to work for you.

One last consideration. Some of the search engines
with free submittal (such as Google) use your "page
rank" to help determine your placement in their
listings. The number of sites that point to you (and
how "important" those referring sites are) can move
you far up or down in the rankings. So a paid Yahoo
listing may increase the value of your free Google
listing.

And the pay per click listings in Overture (now that
they show up on Yahoo) have probably tripled the
traffic for my company's e-commerce site, finally
pushing us over the 1 million hit mark in December. It
may not work for everyone, but it sure was profitable
for us.



Received on Wed Jan 23 2002 - 10:57:53 CST