Paid Inclusion Topics and Issue
Greg Boser is the moderator and he introduced the panel. The first man up was Jim Stobb from PositionTech. He discusses what paid inclusion is: (1) new sites are usually indexed within 72 hours (2) existing pages are recrawled every 48 hours. Two programs (1) Direct Submit (pay per page, flat 12 month fee and plus a CPC and (2) Trusted Feed (pay per click, and designed for sites with 200 or more URLs). Trusted feed key features are; (1) its trusted because they are from a feed and are reviewed by the engines (2) ultimate control over the site content and updated 48 hours and can do geo-targeting (3) click through reporting. Trusted feeds show up in natural results and they are not for everyone. Large sites/commercial sites are good for trusted feeds, so are database driven sites, CMS sites, and flash/multimedia sites. He showed an example of staples.com’s search terms and clicks for its trusted feed program (hope he got approval). When producing the feed they require a destination URL, product name, manufacturer, product description, part #, tracking URL are all important to capture. He showed a screen capture of a staples product and highlighted the data on the page that is being requested in the trusted feed. I wonder if people understand that feeds are normally in csv or xml format and that a bot doesn’t try to determine what criteria is used to figure out what the page is talking about. I think the point is getting across, most people do not look puzzled. He then discusses the value of choosing PositionTech to manage your trusted feeds. Then he goes into how they use the data dump and the crawling process, then showed a sample final feed format.
Next up was Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Greg introduces him as the first search rep to post at a forum under his real name. Tim’s task is to support the much debated Overture PFI programs. He reasons that this gives the web-master a support line when it comes to ranking issues. The next slide is named “Why do we need a feed program?” Less then 1% of the index is PFI content, this is a premium service. He said the more Yahoo crawls the less unique content they find (maybe they are looking in the wrong place – just kidding). This program, he admits, is somewhat controversial, but has lead to a dialog between the SEO and the engines. PFI offers higher redundancy – ensures your content is always in the index even if your site goes down. Then discusses Site Match and Site Match Xchange (which is for larger sites). Pros include content inclusion across all networks, frequent refresh, quality review and interaction with the engines and detailed reporting (ROI stuff). Tim clarifies that PFI doesn’t mean that your rankings will improve (or at least that is how I interpreted it).
Joe Laratro from MoreVisibility.com was next up, he said he was from Florida (good to know). He defined PFI and XML feeds – PFI is a pull of data and XML trusted feed is a push of data (good explanation to start off with). He then goes over the guidelines; subject to editorial review, subject to strict algorithms, typical requirements (title Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.
Barry is currently covering the WebMasterWorld Conference Live via $25 a day WiFi
