
…before Yahoo made this move, I suspect that many marketers could get by on organic Google crawls and targeted AdWords/Overture buys. Now, because Yahoo is in a duopoly position, the stakes are raised, and marketers feel like they *have* to be part of the Yahoo club. They fear, I am sure, that if they do not pay, somehow they will be treated as second class citizens by Yahoo’s Slurp! crawler. Yahoo insists that its organic crawler is going to be “aggressive” and that paid inclusion is an add on of sorts, it insures that your site is crawled thoroughly and in the manner you choose (in particular, you can specify dynamic content, get fresher crawls, get reports, etc.).
But the company seems a bit tone deaf to the more primal forces at work here. First, the timing. Yahoo got a lot of mojo for the new engine it rolled out recently. Why taint that credibility so quickly with this announcement? The company could have waited a month or so, prepared the market for this in stages (for example, it might have cultivated an influencer network prior to the announcement, as I point out in my current 2.0 column). Secondly, it’s predictable that marketers would feel like they have no choice, that they are being forced to enlist in CAP. That is not good for a company’s reputation long term. If I were Yahoo, I’d monitor this closely, and adjust a bit if need be. Perhaps soothing words and assurances will be enough while the market swallows this new dose of medicine. But Google can and will make a PR killing portraying Yahoo as the Big Evil Biased Bully. Ask Jeeves already has: yesterday it cancelled its paid inclusion program …. I am sure the timing was pure coincidence.
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