The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2005, Volume 4, Issue 7

Google’s Sitemaps: Does Yahoo! Paid Inclusion Still Offer Benefits?

by Andrew Janis, Paid Search Specialist, iProspect

With Google’s recent launch of Sitemaps, at first glance the paid inclusion landscape appears to have changed dramatically. However, paid inclusion from Yahoo! Search Submit Pro (SSP) still provides many benefits that Google does not.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s Sitemaps program, it is Google’s new, free directed crawl experiment. Essentially, this valuable new product allows a website owner to submit a list of URLs it wishes Google to index, as well as a suggestion as to how often Google should check back for new content. This is beneficial to website owners because it offers the possibility that Google will find and index deeper website content than it would through a natural crawl.

This could be extremely helpful for websites that have “crawlability” issues, or sites with deep content that changes frequently and is often overlooked in a natural crawl. However, Sitemaps offers no guarantees on content indexing or refresh cycles. According to Google, “We don't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. Additionally…we can't make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index.”

This is in contrast to the benefits provided by Yahoo! Search Submit Pro. While SSP does have a cost-per-click fee, you get what you pay for. Some of the major benefits of SSP are:

Indexing

When you submit a page through SSP, you know it will be indexed. Although there is no guarantee of ranking, your page will at least be given the chance to compete.

Guaranteed Refresh Times

If your content changes often enough to warrant it (e.g., retail sites), Yahoo! will re-crawl your feed every day and new content will enter the index every 48 hours.

The biggest difference between the two programs, however, is that with SSP you are actually submitting a data feed which contains only the information you want to include about each URL. For each submitted page, you can submit a display URL, tracking URL, title, description, body, and keyword set. This provides a number of advantages over Sitemaps:

Keyword Phrase Optimization

While the content in the SSP feed needs to match the content on the website, you can target your content toward keyword phrases that are important to your business, or towards keyword phrases you know will convert. If, for example, you know that a listing for “Polk 6" x 9" 3-Way Speakers” performs better when the targeted keyword phrase is “Polk Speakers,” you can reconfigure your feed to leave the more detailed information in the body and keyword sets, and simply make the title (which is more important for ranking performance) “Find Polk Speakers at Acmeappliance.com.”

Yahoo! Targeted Optimization

If your SSP provider is skilled in their optimization techniques, you can use your data feed to directly target the Yahoo! ranking algorithm. In other words, you can structure your feed in ways you know will help you rank best in Yahoo!, and then use your actual website to target the Google algorithm.

Feed De-optimization

Perhaps the most intriguing, and most often overlooked, optimization technique is de-optimization. If, for example, you know the keyword phrase “Polk Speakers” drives a lot of non-converting traffic, you can restructure your listing to ensure that this combination of words never appears in that order in the listing, instead optimizing for “Polk 6x9 Speakers,” “Polk 3-Way Speakers,” etc.

So, though much of the press and the hoop-la over Google’s new Sitemaps service is valid and warranted, it is certainly not a replacement for Yahoo!’s paid inclusion. Ideally, participate in both, and wait to see how competition drives the functionality and benefits of both programs.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: July 2005, Volume 4, Issue 7

Google’s Sitemaps: Does Yahoo! Paid Inclusion Still Offer Benefits?

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2005, Volume 4, Issue 7