The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2004, Volume 3, Issue 3

Tawadros Tid-Bits: Changes in the Paid Inclusion Marketplace

by John Tawadros, VP, Client Services & Technology, iProspect

This past June, MSN notified online marketers that it would no longer be using the Overture OSMX Paid Inclusion (PI) program to populate its search results. In an effort to increase market share and enhance user experience, MSN has cleaned-up its search interface. The engine now limits the number of sponsored listings on the top of the page to three and subsequently displays 15 “natural” search results directly beneath the three ads. The right side of the page continues to display up to five sponsored listing “box” ads, similar to the look of Google’s Adwords™. You’ll also notice that MSN boasts new Google-look-alike results pages, as a whole, in that they are uncluttered and free of eclectic advertising, banners and other imagery.

In a similar move, AskJeeves plans to discontinue its use of the Teoma paid inclusion program to populate its results. Because of recent feature upgrades, AskJeeves believes its algorithm is now capable of returning relevant search results aggressively and adequately, and as a result, it no longer needs to rely on website owners to submit their pages via a paid inclusion feed.

These changes could have extensive implications within the search industry. The pressure to revamp search engine models will be felt heavily by Google and Yahoo!, the top two search engines according to market share. Yahoo! may need to rethink its decision to use paid inclusion if it begins to see its market share fall off. Google’s branding, with its clean interface and advertisement free appearance, has now been duplicated by MSN. Consequently, Google has lost these traits as key differentiators.

What does this mean for search marketers?

Keep a close eye on the changes in the ever-shifting search engine industry. This has never been more crucial to maintaining online marketing success.
MSN has released a beta version of its new search results ranking algorithm that they plan to launch by the end of the year. Its release could change everything. (techpreview.search.msn.com)
Anticipate a drop in the overall volume of traffic in MSN if your site is not well optimized for the search engine spiders named “Slurp” and “MSNBot.” The good news is, if you’ve already optimized your website for Google, your existing strategies will help with MSN spiders as well.
Since you no longer need to pay for traffic from MSN Search, it allows you to decrease your budget for PI and reinvest it in natural search engine optimization or paid search advertising.

Conclusion

MSN believes that these changes will enhance the user experience by delivering more relevant search results. The upside for marketers is free indexing into MSN. The downside is that you lose the paid inclusion guarantee of regular, frequent re-indexing of your Web pages. Additionally, if your site utilizes spider-hindering technologies that limit your visibility in Google, you can bet that you’ll experience the same issues with MSN. You need to have a well planned strategy for spider-based engines!

As stated in last month’s edition of the Search Marketing Advisor, iProspect recommends a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy that includes natural search engine optimization, paid search advertising and paid inclusion participation.

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: July 2004, Volume 3, Issue 3

Tawadros Tid-Bits: Changes in the Paid Inclusion Marketplace

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
July 2004, Volume 3, Issue 3