The Internet: Land of the Free Submission?
The people have spoken, and evidently, Yahoo! has listened. Last week, all Yahoo! properties informed us that to submit, you would have to go through Overture Site Match. This caused a huge outcry from the internet marketing world to the effect that even low cost PPC is too expensive for many internet-based small businesses, and the Yahoo! and its partners had priced themselves right out of that market.
Today, AltaVista and AllTheWeb have added a paragraph to the effect that they are working on improvements to their free submission and it will be available again soon. What's more, Yahoo! itself now offers a free submission! The internet marketing world discovered this new development this morning, and it took me 5 tries to get a site through the submission process, but I have verified that it is in fact active. It will take several weeks for the site to be crawled, according to Yahoo!, but that is standard practice.
The question that remains is, where will these free sites rank? Will they mingle in the main search results with the sites submitted through Site Match? If so, will the Site Match sites be weighted more heavily? Or will the free sites be listed separately, as Yahoo! used to do way back when their Directory listings came first, followed by the Google free listings? If people get no reward for paying Site Match, then there will be no incentive to sign up; on the other hand, if your free submission doesn't show up anywhere in the search results, then this is just a smoke screen, to make it appear as though Yahoo! is giving the little guy an equal chance.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming weeks, but it is at least an encouraging sign.
After reading your this, I went to Yahoo and submitted any site I could remember. Just hope they will not become second garniture in Yahoo search results.
Posted by:Vaclav | March 26, 2004 at 01:22 AM