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Yahoo Sells Its Top Positions To The Highest Bidder
In a move that caused a great deal of commotion in the search engine optimization world this week, Yahoo has now partnered with Overture (formerly Goto.com) to provide 3 sponsored listings at the top of a search results page and 2 sponsored listings at the bottom of each search results page.
This was announced Tuesday November 13 and was implemented that Thursday. The first results page of a search gives position 1,2 and 3 from Overture and results 4 and 5 are at the bottom of the results page. This is continued as you continue to click through Yahoo results pages. The second Yahoo results page gives you listing numbers 6,7 and 8 at the top and listing numbers 9 and 10 at the bottom. This pattern appears to continue throughout the Yahoo listings. However, if there are more listings in Yahoo than there are the number of sponsored listings in Overture, then the cycle repeats itself. The sponsored listings appear in both the main directory listings and the secondary listings produced by Google.
As an example, doing a search for the phrase 'hammock chairs' in the Web Pages section of Yahoo (these are the secondary results produced by Google), there are only 25 paid advertisers on Overture as of today. But there are 5630 listing in the Google-driven listings of Yahoo. There are 5 Overture listings for every 20 Yahoo listings. So at listing 101-120 it cycles back to paid listings 1 through 5 from Overture. You can see this example by going here: http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=hammock+chairs&hc=0&hs=22
This is not typically how sponsored listings have worked with other Overture partners such as AOL Search and Netscape Search. The standard approach is to promote the first 2, 3 or 4 listings from Overture and discard the rest. The consequence of this is there have been major bidding wars for these positions.
On the negative front, consumer awareness groups, small business owners and search engine marketers are less than thrilled with this current trend. The arguments range from misleading searchers, to stealing the web away from businesses with small budgets, to just being plain lousy results.
The proponents suggest this is the beginning of a new viable business model for search engines. The free ride is over.
Either way, the deal between Yahoo and Overture expires in April, states an Associated Press article. The article goes on to say, this deal... "can serve as a short-term solution for Yahoo! until it can develop the sales force and technical capability to offer the paid search listings itself." Full article can be found here: http://www.nando.net/technology/story/169861p-1634746c.html
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