Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Traffick | Minding the Search Engines' Business: "what could Yahoo do, then? How about being more transparent? Why not offer a subscription service where search engine marketers who participate in the new paid-inclusion program could be advised of changes to the Yahoo search algorithm and make necessary changes before they're implemented? It seems a bit useless to pay for inclusion on an annual basis per URL and then just guess at the factors that could make your site appear nearer the top rankings.

Yahoo wouldn't have to give away the store to give helpful advice to marketers who desperately crave basic guidance on which search engine optimization techniques are acceptable practices and which are not. Google is so utterly non-transparent (opaque?) that it forces marketers to spend hundreds of hours per year trying to deconstruct monthly changes to try to keep up with the times.

The issue of relevance with free listings is one thing, but when you have to pay for pay-per-click ads and to be indexed, marketers deserve more. With all those smart people on their payroll, I'm sure someone can devise a plan that would strike a balance between relevancy and fairness to customers whose fortunes rise and fall by search engine rankings."