Feature: COLUMNISTS: Yahoo! goes 'pay for exclusion!'

Search columnist Mike Grehan on Yahoo's double dumping - Google and Inktomi.

In a move which really "came out of the bushes" Yahoo! has let slip that it will soon exclude Inktomi paid inclusion URLs from its main results. (Friday, 20 February: New Yahoo search has surprise in store)

Quite simply, if you've subscribed your URLs to the Inktomi index, then you'll be found in Yahoo! searches until 15th April. After that - YOU get dumped and have to pay to get back into Yahoo! You WILL still be found over at MSN and HotBot where Inktomi results are still primary though.

If, for instance, you use the first-class, third-party service which Position Technologies provides for paid inclusion and "Trusted Feed" to Inktomi, Fast and Jeeves, you'll soon find a "fourth" checkbox for the new Yahoo! inclusion.

So, it's a free ride until April for the anticipated drop in Google generated clicks and the Yahoo! (via Inktomi) bonanza.

It was the second surprise for search marketers last week, after Yahoo! had already discreetly dumped Google results on Tuesday and replaced them with a brand new index of its own. (Wednesday, 18 February: UPDATE: Yahoo dumps Google at last)

That in itself was a less than expected move. Not that they dumped Google: But that they replaced them with a brand new search engine index. Most industry pundits were certain of a simple "switch over". That said, it did leave one to wonder what exactly they would do with the other search engine inventory it owned.

Alta Vista and AllTheWeb between them have history, huge-corpus search crawling experience, and excellent third generation crawl and search technology.

Putting all of that together with Inktomi - along with the very talented team of information retrieval scientists, researchers and engineers that goes with it - then you could likely achieve "tours de force" similar to that of Google.

And spectacular Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel, looks like becoming the noted architect of just that. While many others are pondering over technology and the search space - one man (great former entertainments marketer) - did a simple SWOT analysis and pulled off a parallel. Of course, having the idea "buy-in" of the organisation and the input of multi-millions of dollars probably did assist - no less great an achievement though!

"Joe Url" is not going to be happy with this, one would think. Having paid to be in the Inktomi index with the (seeming) potential promise of turning up in Yahoo! after Google gets ousted - and then finding that it was all wishful thinking!

What's left to surprise the unhappy search marketer? Lots that we may not have an inkling about so far. But one where you can speculate a little is trusted feed. The Inktomi/Yahoo current paid inclusion deal only covers subscriptions: What happens next with trusted feed then?

Not-so-trusted "official cloaking", as it's sometimes viewed, is a very grey colour in the whole search marketing mix. But there's no comment from the supplier or the intermediaries about what happens next there.

The options are simple:

- Pay to be in Inktomi and be guaranteed to be in Yahoo until April (and the lesser noticed, for now, MSN until your next bill)

- Don't pay to be in Inktomi and hope to be found in an honest crawl and remain forever (at least until MSN dumps Inktomi and then you're nowhere again!)

- Pay to be in Yahoo! and be guaranteed to be in there until your next bill

- Don't pay to be in Yahoo! and be somewhere, sometimes, but who knows how and where - or why!

- Do nothing and be found for everything at HotBot (whatever that is!)

- There's always this: Dig a big whole and throw all of your money in it. Then, take the eye of a Newt and the wing of a bat. Boil the cauldron...

Mike Grehan is a search marketing consultant and author of Search Engine Marketing: The essential best practice guide (www.search-engine-book.co.uk). Contact Mike at .

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