will site match paid inclusion get priority?

Yahoo "representatives" posting FAQ on the various forums keep saying that the paid inclusion listings will NOT get "preferred" ranking .... but take a look at what the salespeople have to say to try and get your money .....

" ...... In fact the Site Match Program is much better. Not only are you getting
more search engine coverage, but you get priority ranking as well. The
Express Inclusion only guarantees inclusion and no priority ranking. On the
other hand, the Site Match Program has priority ranking over the free
webpage listings. This means that Site Match URLs will push down the "web
results" of the free listings......."


so ... who do you suppose is telling us a "fairy tale" ....??

Where's that quote from?

Sitematch sites are human reviewed. Passing human review is a factor, so it'll give you something of a boost. 1%, 20%? We need ppl who were in the results but joined anyway to tell us.

KD

That is down right FALSE.

You will not get "priority ranking" for doing SiteMatch paid inclusion. They will continue to rank the paid and organic indexed results based on the same algorithm which is based on relevancy only.

You might get personalized advice from Yahoo reps on how to change your pages and feeds to increase your page's relevancy for keywords. But that is all.

well ... that is my point ... one of those two statements has to be false ...., they can not both be true.

the quote i posted above is right out of an email of a sales rep trying to get us to sign up for the site match ..... i have it in my file here ... which is actually more like a "file cabinet" than a file ....

obviously .,.. they will try to make people think they will get preferred treatment to sell it ... why else would anyone buy it .,.. who knows what will really happen with the serps .... only one thing is certain ... IF those PFI links float to the top, they will get clicked on MORE ... and then yahoo will make more doa ....

so, if making more doa does NOT affect their operations ... then we can all believe that pfi's will NOT get preferred placement ....

I heard from Tim Mayer of Yahoo - the big shot there - first hand, that this is not the case. SiteMatch will not distort the organic's relevancy. They will not give preferential treatment to SiteMatch results. They will however, give preferential service to the SiteMatch customer. See difference? customer vs results.

At Danny Sullivan's round table at SES NY (the day following the sitematch release) he relayed the conversation he'd had with the people from Yahoo and (I'm paraphrasing) Sitematch sites are human reviewed. Passing human review is a factor are his words. He may have been misinformed, especially considering that the program was less than 24 hours old.
What he also relayed was that non-Sitematch sites are also reviewed (although what % how often is anyone's guess). So you can still get that rankings boost if you aren't in the program, it just isn't certain (or likely).

I just got High Rankings Advisor http://www.highrankings.com and Jill (moderator) says

At the SES conference, there was an evening session where Danny was discussing this a bit. I believe he said that the Yahoo reps told him that there was a sort of extra "check box" that gets checked for any pages in the paid-inclusion program. This checkmark is supposed to signify that the page has passed the editorial review process. Taking that one step further, it sounds as if Yahoo's algorithm takes into consideration whether a site is checked or unchecked when determining where it should rank for any given search query.

ADD:
The reason for random sites being reviewed is to avoid regulatory problems as the sitematch sites are mixed with naturally indexed sites.
Engines misinform us on a regular basis. This is an easy one to test if it's worth a few dollars to you and you have a low-traffic site or a site you don't mind risking getting dropped when you stop paying and is already in the index. The site also has to be a site that would pass human review.

KD

I never met an Inktomi program that didn't give preferential treatment to PFI. Now of course this is the new Yahoo or is that Inktomi. There are still a lot of old pages out there that say Inktomi PFI, in the past, was not giving preferred treatment. Internal memos from Inktomi then exposed quite the opposite. It was like when they were caught in a lie they were now truthful.

From experience Ink pages that were refreshed frequently ended up near the top. It doesn't totally compensate for bad optimization though. It's just the refreshes of the free sites are so seldom they fall or disappear in the rankings.

Yahoo may be giving one take on the matter but not all takes. They're failing to mention poor treatment of free sites can put PFI sites square on top.

If you buy they're going to treat paying and non-paying customers the same thats not totally rational thinking.

That is exactly where they can get you.

But keep in mind, non-commercial sites can utilize sitematch for free. That is their rational. lets see how things pan out with the relevancy versus PFI.

these PFI programs are suspect enough when you just pay a fee for the review .... now that a pay per click fee is included .... my christal ball tells me that this will be the first step that at some point will bring some form of government regulation to the se business.

and personally, i think that may not be bad for internet users and MOST webmasters. (most will exclude the big spenders of course).

So if I pay for Sitematch and my site is #197, what good is it?

my guess is if you pay for site match it wont be 197 anymore .... i am HOPELESSLY addicted to what my dad taught me ....

"you can only count on other people to do that is in THEIR BEST INTEREST"

if you site gets clicks, yahoo makes more money ..... so figuring that one out is a no-brainer ....

and yahoo has set it up to be able to do that without making any ripples ... by comming out with serps that look like the machine just throws out some random block of related sites anyway ... with no consistency in how they are ordered ....

therefore ... it will be nearly impossible to point to a PFI listing at the top and say "see there" it is getting preferred treatment ...

not until a lawsuite forces their computer records to be opened up to the light of day can anyone prove what is or was going on ....

i suppose that will happen ... the question is who and when .... maybe the FTC ... they seemd to be concerend with PFI generally ... now with pay per click build into the mix ... i personally think that will cross over the line ... and also show them that the industry is simply NOT capible of policing itself .... too much GREED by the kingpins of search .... ( more fodder for my theming test -- those same kingpins of search may learn a few things about saving the whales, since long ago in a galaxy far away, the people killing whales used to be able to do whatever they wanted to ... not they can not ....

Google Watch, home of Scroogle, has launched a Yahoo Watch proxy. Right now it shows that the old Inktomi PFI stuff is ranking better than other links. We will be watching SiteMatch very closely for any evidence of ranking differential. If we can't tell the difference between a SiteMatch link and an unpaid link, we will go screaming to the FTC, because this is something that ought to be labeled so that we can track it.

Nice one Kackle

Hi Kackle. I can answer your question right now about the long weird links. Mine shows up as one of those, and I can assure you mine isn't a paid link. Until I can get to the point where I can actually pay my bills, search engines won't be getting my money. But I AM extremely curious as to why my site has that bizarre link showing up.

dazzlindonna, I looked at the long URL in yahoo.com that you are referring to. It came from Inktomi and is still in Inktomi. Look at search.msn.com and you will see the same long link, only with a redirect to inktomi.com/click instead of yahoo.com/click.

Whether you paid or not, past or present, or whether something else is going on, I have no idea. But the source of that link is Inktomi. The question that should worry you is whether something will happen to that link on April 15, which is when Yahoo is threatening to drop the old PFI links.