I gave Matt Cutts a little bit of a hard time in response to his critisism of hand coding of results a few months back. From his post:
We talked earlier about some of the issues with Yahoo hand-coding shortcuts for queries, and the difficulty of knowing if money was involved.
After all, it’s clear to me that Google has done some hand coding of results in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
However, the Yahoo CAP program Search is much more ominous:
Web Results may also include links to sites that participate in the Content Acquisition Program (CAP). CAP enables content providers to submit web content directly to Yahoo! for review and inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index; content providers that participate in CAP through the Search Submit program pay for these services. Participation in CAP or Site Match does not guarantee placement or ranking in search results but additional information made available through the direct data feeds may increase or decrease relevance depending on the search query.
So here’s how the CAP program might work:
1. You do your research and understand what search terms convert. For example, the search phrase “buy Meridia online” has a much higher chance of making a sale than “research information on Meridia” and will find higher paying customers than “Low cost Meridia.”
2. You agree to bribe Yahoo with a certain amount of money through their CAP program.
3. You supply Yahoo a “direct data feed” for your site that essentially say: My site is more relevant for the search term “high converting search term” and less relevant for the term “poor converting search term”
4. You rank for the terms you want in Yahoo’s “Organic” results.
Here’s why is this so alarming:
If this bribery for “organic” results becomes more acceptable and commonplace then the search engines will suck the margins out of every business on the web. CAP will essentially be a tax the search engines impose on anyone wanting to monitize search traffic.
Today Google has a unique opportunity. An opportunity to legitimize their “Don’t do Evil” slogan and hopefully shame the other search engines into doing the same:
Googles’ upper management should digitally sign an oath to never accept compensation in exchange for preference in what we now call the organic SERPs.
Today, I’m calling for this as part of a Search Engine Code of Ethics. I think it would be a good idea for a panel of high profile search professionals to help draft this Search Engine Code of Ethics. Let’s start the conversation. Let’s get the ball rolling.
After all, if we can’t Trust Search Engines to be ethical – we cannot trust them with our information.
4 Responses to “Yahoo Accepting Bribes for Organic Search Results”
Your’re over-reacting!!! There are many content-rich sites from major content providers with valuable and interesting content that is not easily indexed/crawled by the search engines. It is a service to get this into the index. Furthermore, some of those huge sites require a lot of server time on both the site side and the engine side just to crawl the whole damn thing to pick up the new and refreshed pages. The crawlers sometimes visit daily, putting a big load on resources. By providing a feed, the sites can say, include me, but don’t crawl me. This is great for the engines, users, and sites. Lastly, Yahoo is not selling placement - they offer back-end reporting on impressions and clicks for the keywords. You have to buy ALL the inventory, not just a portion, so its not buying placement, its buying inclusion without changing your site with SEO or having high resource utilization from crawlers. All around, this is a good thing in my opinion.
You want google/yahoo to have ethics while you have a site about spamming their index, the irony.
I’m with you 100%. The stance of this website is irrelevant to the job of a search engine. All this site does is help the web advance, with out people like us the internet would suck, something like 1999 time capsule. With no security flaws, there would be no need for further innovation, we give developers another reason to create. Using black hat SEO is just a way we get paid for our hard work, just like they do. Open your mind.
LMAO!!! Wow. Search Engine Code of Ethics from a guy who runs a site discussing nothing but ways to game the search engines..
Pot, kettle, black.
Just a random observation.
Vic