Preparing for Yahoo’s imminent change

• Sep. 22, 2003

Yahoo purchased Inktomi earlier this year with plans of replacing the current Google results. Yahoo is a major player in the search engines and they should not be overlooked and you should start preparing now for Yahoo’s imminent change. Yahoo is currently in the top 3 of the major search engines.

A little bit on Yahoo to come

Yahoo has two main results pages. The primary results are from the Web Pages and the secondary results are from the Web Directory. Once Yahoo changes over its results to Inktomi from the current Google listings, the only way to be listed in Yahoo is to pay some type of fee. For example, with Yahoo's directory, there is a $299 yearly fee to be listed in their directory. If you want to be instantly be listed in the paid listings, you can bid the appropriate price on Overture for the desired listing, and when Yahoo changes over to Inktomi listings for the web pages results (this is the default listings), there is a paid inclusion for every page you want included. With Yahoo being able to drive great qualified traffic to your site, this is something that you will want to have included in your yearly marketing budget.

A Note on Inktomi

With Inktomi’s paid inclusion program, for every page you subscribe with their service, this guarantees that your subscribed page will be spidered every 48 hours, ensuring that the latest changes will be available when Yahoo and the other Inktomi database engines update their results. To see if you are in Inktomi’s database, check http://search.positiontech.com/InktomiSearch/PositionTechSearch.jsp.

One thing you can do is check out your current results in HotBot. That little search engine that we have all almost forgot about. HotBots default listings come from Inktomi. Please remember that Yahoo will have a different algorithm when analyzing its results so do not expect the same results. This is just to give you an idea of what to possibly expect with rankings.

Preparing for the Future

The first thing I would recommend for any site, is to be listed in Yahoo’s Web Directory. This is almost a given for any website still. Every website needs a good foundation to stand on, and a good start is being listed in DMOZ (open directory) and Yahoo’s Web Directory. Next, decide how many pages you want to have included in Inktomi’s database with their paid inclusion program.

It is very important that you start making the move now in preparing for Yahoo's imminent change. We are not sure when exactly it is going to happen, but we do know that it is going to happen. Google will not be providing the default listings in Yahoo forever, and for some websites that are not prepared, this will mean a big drop in traffic and possible revenue when the big changeover  takes place.

Gerard Manning
Searchengineposition, Inc.
Search engine marketing company