Overture introduces Site Match

So as of today, Overture has introduced a new service called Site Match. This program allows you to pay to have your site included in the normal (not sponsored) search results and then pay an additional fee on a per click basis. Once your site is approved, you will be included in Yahoo! Search and other web portal partners including Yahoo! Search, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Excite, Lycos, and About.com.

Inktomi, Altavista express inclusion, and Fast pay inclusion are no more. Those who paid to join these services will still be included in the search results until their subscription expires. They also have the option to ‘upgrade’ (ie sign up because there’s no discount) to Site Match for $49 for the 1st URL + $29 for URLs 2-10 + $10 for URLs after 10. In addition, clicks on the link will cost $.15 or $.30 depending on site category.

There’s a lot of buzz in the Search Engine world about what this means for marketers who want to be listed on Yahoo. The ultimate question is what percentage Yahoo will allow paid inclusion in their editorial listings. Right now, that number is claimed to be about 1% of search results. Google is all editorial, so odds are they won’t go for a high percentage of paid search…

The good news is that Yahoo has a free crawler (Yahoo Slurp) that crawls sites and adds content to the database. From my experience, this crawler has been faster than Google’s Googlebot, which hopefully means that Yahoo is serious about adding relevant, editorial content to their search (and that search engine optimization best practices will be enough to ensure a top position).

» Yahoo Search Results to Include Paid Links (CNN)

» Yahoo adopts listing fees for certain Web pages (MSNBC)

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