Paid Inclusion & Trusted Feeds - BAM!
Dennis Buchheim, Director of Search Marketing Solutions, Yahoo! was up first. He discussed he new content acquisition program which includes free web crawl, site match for commercial sites and the public site match for non-commercial sites. Overture is the brand that will be used for SiteMatch, the program with the flat fee and CPC. Existing programs are closed (Inktomi, AV and FAST), they will last until they expire but no new customers. There is a customer migration plan that you can contact them about.
Michael Palka, Director of Search, Ask Jeeves announced that they have made some changes to the program. Site Submit allows users to submit URLs for a flat fee. The second program, trusted feed program, they decided to eliminate. The most important thing to them is relevancy and they feel everything else will fall into place based on that.
David Turner, Director of European Operations, Position Tech compared yesterday's spam as today's trusted feed. He gave some basic information on what a trusted feed is. I think his presentation should have preceded the two previous ones. He summed up saying trusted feed is not spam, its normal algorithmic search.
Gour Lentell, Search Director, Decide Interactive who discussed optimization tactics for trusted feeds. You need to decide which content to include, then group and organize that content, then implement optimization strategies, deploy good creative messages, create landing pages, utilize geo-targeting, keep seasonality in mind and always conform to editorial guidelines.
Eric Neuner, Marketing Manager, Medscape/WebMD. They have a deal directly with Inktomi. They have multiple types of content distribution areas, some free some paid. WebMD was built a long time ago and was not search engine friendly. When they first talked to Inktomi they had only 10 pages indexed organically. They came up with some paid inclusion pricing solutions would be $x CPC. PFI was an excellent avenue for WebMD based on this information. They jumped from 10 to 65,000 URLs. The recent Inktomi migration with Yahoo increased WebMDs traffic 70%. He would like to see a maximum monthly spend with the CPC model. WebMD also ranks #1 for "animal porn", not bad.
Adam Jewell, Search Engine Marketing Manager, NetPlus Marketing Inc. presented a case study on Toll Brothers.
That wraps up the New York City 2004 Search Engine Strategies Conference. I hope to have an article written to summarize the conference. I hope you enjoyed my notes on the conference.
