Yahoo offers deeper site search--for a fee

In concert with wholly-owned subsidiary Overture Services Inc., Yahoo Inc. is launching a service that will make it easier for deep or dynamic content--material on web pages less readily discovered by search engine crawlers--to get into Yahoo’s index for potential inclusion in search results. The program includes a paid inclusion component for commercial content providers.

The program, called the Content Acquisition Program, gives content providers a structured method for providing information to Yahoo Search, including technical information on how to format content for delivery into Yahoo’s index, as well as assistance, if needed, in actually producing direct feeds to Yahoo. CAP will enable both non-commercial and commercial content providers to better interact with Yahoo search technology, by facilitating content delivery to Yahoo’s index, according to Yahoo, where it will be displayed in search results based on relevancy.

Yahoo is working with both commercial and non-commercial content providers on the CAP program, including, on the non-profit side, National Public Radio and the Library of Congress. Overture has launched a paid inclusion program, called Site Match, as the commercial component of CAP. Overture Site Match is available as a self-service subscription program for smaller commercial content providers, while Site Match Exchange is a program for larger commercial content providers.

Site Match subscribers who submit fewer than 1,000 URLs pay an annual submission fee of $49 for the first URL, a charge that drops depending on how many URLs they submit. They’ll also pay a cost per click for each web user that clicks on the listing, with that CPC averaging about 15 cents and some categories priced at up to 30 cents. Commercial content providers submitting 1,000 URLs or more can subscribe to Site Match Exchange for no annual fee per URL, with a CPC of up to $1 depending on the content category.

“We are pleased to join the Site Match Exchange program which will provide greater access to Yahoo’s large user base and generate additional leads,” says Curt Cozadd, director of marketing for Carsdirect. “The expanded reach and direct interaction with Yahoo were selling points in joining this program.”

Yahoo Search’s goal is to crawl 100% of the web’s content for free, says Chris Bolte, vice president, strategic alliances at Overture, who adds that under that goal, content from providers not participating in CAP will continue to be crawled and indexed by Yahoo spiders. However, outside of paid search, interacting with search engines and figuring out the search engine algorithms that determine content relevancy has been something of a guessing game for content providers, he adds, with maximizing content delivery depending on third parties.

By working directly with content providers under the CAP program, “We are trying to remove it from the guessing game and making it clear and structured so content providers know how to operate,” he says.