Recent Changes with Yahoo! Search
As you may or may not have known, Overture purchased AltaVista and FAST early
last year. That was followed later in the year with Yahoo purchasing Overture
and Inktomi, leaving Yahoo with a huge segment of the search engine market.
Inktomi had been providing the search results for Hotbot, MSN, Overture and
several other search engines for sometime. Yahoo then announced that they would
be dropping Google as the provider of the Yahoo search results. This left most
in the SEO industry to assume Yahoo would use the recently acquired Inktomi as
their new search results provider.
March 2nd Yahoo announced they had made a switch. They dropped Google but
Inktomi did not become the replacement. It now appears that Yahoo, Overture,
AltaVista, FAST and Inktomi are being combined to form one search service.
It's hard to say at this point what the impact the changes will have on the
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. It has been stated that Yahoo
provides about a third of the traffic to most web sites. These initial changes
are seen as the first in a series of changes. It is known from this initial
change that a single engine is now powering Yahoo's search results.
Yahoo has yet to announce plans regarding their Yahoo Directory and
participants in the directory are still paying $299 annually to be listed.
Yahoo has added a FREE
submission service to its web site to allow submission to the new search
engine. Yahoo has clearly stated that you do not have to pay to be included in
the new engine.
A check of the AltaVista and
FAST submission pages shows both have been taken offline and the paid
inclusions for these engines has been removed. PositionTech, the former parent
company of Inktomi, has announced on their site a partnership with Yahoo for
paid inclusion into the Overture pay-per-click searches. There is no longer a
paid submission for Inktomi at PositionTech. Lycos, the parent company of
Hotbot, still has paid inclusion options on both the Lycos and Hotbot web
sites. They state that their paid inclusion will get you submitted to FAST and
Inktomi and inclusion in the results of Lycos, Hotbot and MSN. It is not
recommended that the Lycos/Hotbot paid inclusion be used. It is currently
unknown where the fees are going and whether the pages are actually submitted
to any search engine.
Yahoo has created the Overture Site Match Service is for pages that cannot be
easily spidered by Yahoo's free spider. Pages such as dynamically or database
driven fall into this category. The benefit of this service is guaranteed and
quick inclusion. Yahoo states that the inclusion time should be 48 hours in the
near future. The Overture Site Match requires a non-refundable annual fee as
well as a cost-per-click (CPC) fee. Make sure your understand the workings and
cost of this type of system and how it relates to your profit margins. Full
details on how the system works can be found at
Yahoo! Submit Your Site. There is also a link on the page to the
Yahoo!/Overture Pay-Per-Performance option.
It appears at this point that Yahoo hasn't started providing the search
results to AltaVista or FAST. Nor are they showing up on MSN, Hotbot or
Overture. There is still much speculation as to what the state of these other
search engines are. Will AltaVista and FAST cease to exist? Will Yahoo Search
start providing Hotbot and MSN search results? The coming months should be
interesting for Search Engine Optimizers. Check back often and we'll try to
make available the latest information available on these changes.
As a side note on MSN, it had been rumored last year that Microsoft had tried
to purchase Google. When the attempt failed MSN opted to develop its own search
engine. What has been confirmed is that MSN is indeed working on a new search
technology but it is uncertain as to when it may be available.
One thing that is very clear is that any firm performing SEO services had
better stay abreast of the changes taking place and adjust quickly to provide
maximized search results for their clients. The SEO industry is ever changing
and changes happen quickly. Make sure that any firm providing these services
for your web site is up to date on all facets of Search Engine Optimization.
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